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UNITED STATES OF AJMERICA. 



THE 



SACRAMENTALS 



OF 



THE HOLY CATHOLIC CHURCH, 



OR 



FLOWERS FROM THE GARDEN OF THE LITURGY. 



BY 



REV. WILLIAM J. EAR 




*' The many lesser ministrations of grace, which seem to us minute 
and of very secondary importance, have their value and their efficacy, 
which now escape our notice, but may, one day, appear as they deserve." 
— CardixVal Wiseman. 



CINCINNATI: 
PRINTED AND PUBLISHED BY JOHN P. WALSH, 

170 Sycamore Street. 
AND SOLD BY ALL CATHOLIC BOOKSELLERS IN THE UNITED STATES. 



1858. 






,+^ 



v^ 



^ 



Entered according to the Act of Congress, in the year 1857, by 
JOHN P. WALSH, 

in the Clerk's office of the District Court of the United States, for the 
Southern District of Ohio. 




We approve of the publication of the ''Sacra- 
mentals," written by Rev. William James Barhy, 
Professor in Mount St. Mary's Seminary, Cincinnatii 
and recomTiiend it to the faithful as a work of instruc- 
tion and piet}". 

Y JOPIN B., Archbishop of Cincinnati. 

Cincinnali^ Feast of St. Charles^ 1857. 



TO 
THE MOST REV. 

JOHN BAPTIST PURCELL, D.D., 

ARCHBISHOP OF CINCINNATI, 

THIS LITTLE VOLUME 

IS MOST RESPECTFULLY AND AFFECTIONATELY 

INSCRIBED 

BT 

HIS DUTIFUL CHILD IN CHRIST, 

THE AUTHOR. 



PREFACE. 

This little book does not profess to exhaust 
the subject of the Sacramentals : to do so would 
require a detailed exposition of the whole Liturgy 
of the Church. All the ceremonies of divine wor- 
ship, all the blessed articles used in ecclesiastical 
functions, all the prayers of the Missal, the Ritual, 
the Pontifical and the Breviary are Sacramentals 
— that is, they participate of the nature of Sacra- 
ments without being Sacraments. They are signs 
and channels of actual grace, instituted by ecclesi- 
astical authority. The Sacraments are signs and 
channels of sanctifying, or habitual, grace, instituted 
by divine authority. The present volume is, how- 
ever, complete in itself Each sacred rite is, of 
itself, intelligible and teaches its own holy lesson 
to the Catholic mind and heart. 

I have endeavored to select from the beautiful 
treasures which the Liturgy offers, in almost inex- 
haustible variety, to the choice of even a careless 
explorer, those which fall more frequently under 
the observation of the faithful and which are, con- 
sequently, of greater present utility. To explain 
the historical origin of the Sacramentals on which 
I have written, their mystical meanings and the 



8 PREFACE. 

practical lessons to be drawQ from them constitutes 
the triple end kept in view in the composition of 
this treatise. Whether I have succeeded is a 
question which I leave to the decision of my 
readers. 

No statement, historical or rubrical, is advanced 
which has not been substantiated by the authorities 
at my disposal. The Treatise on the Festivals by 
Benedict XIV., Migne's Cursus Theologize et Scrip- 
turse, the Liturgical Institutions of Fornici, the 
Authentic Decrees of the Sacred Congregation of 
Rites, Cardinal Bona's Treatise on the Liturgy, 
Hierurgia and The Church of our Fathers by Dr. 
Rock and the large Catechisms of Guillois and 
Gaume are the books which I have most frequently 
consulted. 

That the blessing of God may attend this little 
work, that, through the intercession of the Immacu- 
late Virgin Mary and of all the Saints, it may in- 
crease the love of the faithful, be it in ever so small 
a degree, for the holy things and holy rites of 
Mother Church is the sincere prayer of the author. 

W. J. B. 

Mount St. Mary's of the West, 

NEAR Cincinnati, 

Feast of St. Gregory III., 

Nov. 28th, 1857. 



INTRODUCTION. 

The Gospel presents to us the record of our 
Saviour's birth and public life, but passes over, in 
almost total silence, the years of His Egyptian 
exile and His abode at Nazareth. His childhood's 
days wherein His little hands assisted His dear 
Mother in easy household work, or, with the un- 
skilfulness of His age, used the plane and chisel of 
St. Joseph — the glorious evenings of the Jewish 
Summer, when, in early manhood. He went to the 
brow of the cliff that overhung Nazareth, and gazed 
wistfully to the South, towards Jerusalem, and wept 
to think that, whilst all round was so fair, the hearts 
of His countrymen should be curtained by the 
shades of sin — the moonlight nights He passed on 
that same mountain's top in the " prayer of God," 
— all have been hidden from our view. This mys- 
tic period is the "sealed fountain''' and the 
^^ closed garden " of the Canticles. Many a bright 
stream of grace that flows over the green fields of 



10 INTRODUCTION. 

the Church springs from that hidden fount, and 
many a zephyr, richly laden with the perfume of 
lowliest yet sweetest flowers, blows from that mys- 
terious garden. Even in our Lord's public life, 
much He said in familiar converse with His disci- 
ples which the multitude never heard. Not that 
He would conceal His heavenly doctrine, but be- 
cause of the hardness of the Jews' hearts, and, that 
having eyes, they saw not, and ears, and heard not, 
as He Himself declares. The meanest and most 
sinful among them might have gone, if he had so 
chosen, to our Lord, in His retirement, as did Nico- 
demus, to hear from His divine lips the explana- 
tion of each holy saying and parable, as far as it 
was for his soul's good. 

The Church is a perfect copy of Jesus. She is 
the Incarnation continued, and, if Jesus lived a 
hidden life, and taught in public and in private and 
suffered, she has imitated and still imitates Him in 
all. Jesus " spoke to the multitude in parables 
things hidden from the foundation of the world," 
and so, in the first ages, the Church explained the 
great mysteries of the Blessed Eucharist and the 
Trinity to the children of the household only, 
whilst to the scoffing Jew and Heathen, she spoke 
not at all of them, or in guarded and mystic langu- 



INTRODUCTION. 11 

age. And why ? — to exclude them forever from 
the fountains of life-giving grace ? Little would 
we know of the tenderness of her motherly heart 
towards the erring children, bought by the Blood 
of Christ her Spouse if such were our thought. She 
but obeyed the divine iajunction, '' cast not your 
pearls before swine ;" she was waiting until, by her 
holy preaching and holy life, she would soften those 
hard hearts to receive the impress of love from the 
Ever Blessed Three and the mystery of Christ's 
Body and Blood. 

The discipline of the secret is no longer in force? 
but still, there are many beautiful doctrines and 
practices of our religion hidden alike from infidel 
and Catholic, not that the Church conceals them, 
but because they will not seek them. We may 
compare the Church to a glorious temple, whose 
exterior beauty is a type of the interior. We 
enter, and the font at the door tells us that, by 
baptism, we are buried with Christ unto death, and 
rise with Him unto life, members of His mystic 
Body. The statues of the Apostles and other 
Saints tell us that the Church is Apostolic and 
holy. The sacrifice going on at the altar, the Bishop 
administering Confirmation, the penitent leaving 
the sacred tribunal, the calm on his countenance 



12 INTRODUCTION. 

but a faint image of that ia his heart, the priest 
proceeding quickly, yet reverently, down the aisle, 
bearing the Viaticum and the Blessed Oils, the white- 
robed Levites, like worshiping Angels in the sanc- 
tuary, the bride and bridegroom kneeling for the 
nuptial benediction, all tell us that the Church has 
the Seven Sacraments, the seven streams of Precious 
Blood that flow from the Sacred Heart of Jesus. 
We admire and love and then go our way. But if 
we had looked closer we might have noticed many 
rich draperies along tha walls. Thoy conceal small 
yet most beauteous chapels wherein we might h^ve 
seen mnny a rite peformed, full of sweet symbolism, 
yet which has been excluded from the main edifice, 
reserved as that is for statelier functions. 

Now let us. apply our comparison. The leading 
articles of faith, especially the doctrine of the Sa- 
craments, form the great temple itself, whilst what 
Cardinal Wiseman has called the " Minor Rites and 
Offices," under which is included our present sub- 
ject, the " Sacramentals," are the side chapels. 
These minor points of teaching and practice are to- 
day what the discipline of the secret was in the 
Apostolic times, and the familiar discourse of our 
Saviour to the little circle of His disciples in the 
time of His public ministry. The lukewarmness 



INTRODUCTION. 13 

of the faithful has made them so. Unlike the Jews, 
they receive, with respect and love, Christ's public 
instruction delivered by His priests, but like them, 
they do not care to join the company of the disci- 
ples, and talk with our Lord as a Friend and a 
Father. They are guests in the household of the 
faith rather than children. They pay their homage 
to Jesus in the grand reception room, but they do 
not accept His invitation to repair to the inner 
apartment, and, by examining the beautiful trea- 
sures He keeps concealed therein, to have love's 
dying embers kindled into a bright flame. 

We shall love our religion in proportion as we 
study it. Much study will beget charity, and cha- 
rity, we know, blotteth out many sins. 

Love is a flower pleasing to the eye, 

Sweet to the smell, but Love can droop and die : 

Let streams of prayer and study cease to flow 

The root from which Love springs will cease to grow. 

Our love for Jesus and Holy Mother Church 
will become warmer and purer if we examine the 
minor articles of our belief as well as the more im- 
portant. Let us endeavor, with the assistance of 
God, and by following approved Catholic authors, 
to perform this labor of love in regard to the Sa- 
cramentals of the Church. 



WHAT IS A SACRAMENTAL? 

Three things make a Sacrament; the conferring 
of inward grace, by an outward sign, in virtue of 
divine institution. Thus in Baptism the pouring 
of water is the outward sign, and by it habitual, or 
sanctifying, grace is infused into the soul, because 
of Christ's institution. Now the Sacramentals, like 
the Sacraments, have an outward sign or sensible 
element, but unlike them, they are mostly of ec- 
clesiastical origin, and do not, of their own power, 
infuse grace into the soul, but only excite it to 
desires whereby it may obtain from God's gratuit- 
ous mercy that grace or its increase. Holy Water 
is a Sacramental, but, of its own nature, it washes 
not the soul from sin and pours not grace into it, 

as do the waters of Baptism. If, however, a per- 
14 



THE SACRA MENTALS. 15 

son uses it devoutly, it will, on account of the 
Church's blessing attached to it, assist his will in 
forming pious desires. 

The Sacramentals may be arranged under two 
heads — " The Prayers of the Church " and " The 
Benedictions of the Church." 



THE PRAYERS OF THE CHURCH. 



THE PEAYERS OF THE CHURCH. 



The Sacraments of the Church and Prayer are 
the ordinary channels of grace. The first pours 
richer treasures of heaven into the soul ; the second 
nfiore frequent ones. We cannot receive the Sa- 
craments, at all times, but we may and ought to 
pray always. It becomes of great importance then 
to know how to pray well. Qui 'novit bene or are 
novit et bene vivere, was the saying of a holy doctor 
of the Church : he who knows how to pray well 
knows how to live well. You ask and receive noty 
because you ask amiss (St. James, iv. 3.) There 
are different ways of asking amiss. If our prayers 
are not humble, like the poor publican's, if they 
are not persevering, if they beg absolutely for the 

goods of this life, then we ask amiss. If we use 

19 



20 THE PRAYERS OF THE CHURCH. 

forms of prayer which the Church has condemned 
we ask amiss. Forms are not always useless 
things ; it is not always that they savor of pedan- 
try and affectation. Hold the form of sound words 
which thou hast heard from me in faith: this was 
the instruction which the Holy Ghost gave to St. 
Timothy, through the inspired epistle of St. Paul 
(2d Tim'., i. 13.) 

There are many prayers which the Church has 
neither approved nor condemned : Catholic prayer- 
books are full of them. But why should we use 
them to the neglect of so many other beautiful 
forms of prayer which have received the highest 
ecclesiastical sanction? They are generally more 
rhetorical than the prayers of the Liturgy, but, for 
that very reason, they are colder; there is less of 
the unction of the Holy Spirit in them. We by no 
means pretend to say that all of them have the 
"black mark of St. Peter," but it is certain that 
many have not his white mark. Why should we 
prefer them to those that have ? 

A vocal prayer that is of divine or ecclesiastical 
institution is a sacramental. No other is unless 
it has become ecclesiastical by the sanction of the 
legitimate authorities. 

A wide field of Sacramentals at once opens be- 



THE PRAYERS OF THE CHURCH. 21 

fore us. All the prayers said by the priest in the 
Mass, the Psalms sung in the Divine Office, the 
forms of prayer used in the administration of the 
Sacraments, the consecration of bishops, the con- 
ferring of orders, the consecration and blessing of 
churches, bells, vestments, crosses, rosaries, pic- 
tures, etc., are Sacramentals. At present we shall 
dwell upon three forms of prayer: Litanies, the 
Angelas mid Eymm. 



I. 

LITANIES. 



The word Litany is of Greek origin, meaning in 
that language an entreaty or supplication. 

Ecclesiastical writers make mention of four Lit- 
anies : that of the Old Testament, of the Saints, of 
the Blessed Virgin Mary, and of the Holy Name 
of Jesus. 

The Litany of the Old Testament is the 135th 
Psalm (in the Hebrew 136th,) Cwijitemini Domino 
— Praise the Lord, for He is good. Each of the 
first three verses addresses God by a different 
title ; Jehova, Elohim and Adonei are the He- 
brew words. This preface of the Litany shadows 
forth the mystery of the Trinity, Three Persons in 
One God, and corresponds to the triple invocation 

with which the Church begins her Litanies : Kyrie 
22 



LITANIES. 23 

eleison, Christe eleison, Kyrie eleison : Lord have 
mercy an us, Christ have mercy on us, Lord have 
TYiercy on us ; and to the other in which the Three 
Divine Persons are expressly named: Pater de 
ccelis Deus, miserere nobis ; Fill Redemjptor mundi 
Deiis, miserere nobis ; Spiritus Sancte Leus, mis- 
erere nobis: God the Father of Heaven, have 
mercy on us, etc., etc. The twenty-seven verses 
of the Psalm recount the wonders which God 
wrought in favor of His people, and each concludes 
with the same phrase, /br His mercy etidurethfor 
ever, corresponding to liave mercy an lis, or jpray 
for us, with which we reply to the several petitions 
of our Litanies. 

The Litany of the Saints is so called because by 
it we beg the intercession of all the blessed inha- 
bitants of heaven, addressing them sometimes col- 
lectively, according to their different classes, of 
Apostles, Martyrs, Confessors, etc., f^nd sometimes 
individually. 

Many have attributed the authorship of this 
Litany ,to Pope St. Gregory the Great, a.d. 600, 
but not with sufficient reason, for councils held be- 
fore the time of that Holy Pontiff mention it. We 
know from Church history, however, that he had a 
great devotion to the Litany of the Saints and had 



24 LITANIES. 

it sung with much solemnity in the sacred proces- 
sions that marched through the streets of Rome, 
during the prevalence of the plague, begging God 
to withdraw His avenging Hand. The Litany of 
the Saints was used in the East in the time of St. 
Basil the Great, who died in 379, more than two 
hundred years before the pontificate of St. Gregory. 
Hence Cardinal Baronius says, in his notes on the 
Roman Martyrology, that it was impossible for him 
to determine the origin of the Litany, but that it 
was certainly of the greatest antiquity. This Lit- 
any is sometimes called the greater^ sometimes the 
minor Litany. It bears the first appellation on 
the Feast of St. Mark the Evangelist, the 25th of 
April, because the procession of that day, in which 
it is chanted, is one of the most solemn in the 
Church. Other reasons for the name are that the 
procession was instituted by a Pope, and that it 
du^ected its march towards the Church of St. Mary 
Major or the Greater. 

The same Litany said on the Rogation days is 
called the Minor or Less Litany. Towards the 
close of the 5th century the diocese of Vienne in 
France was severely afflicted with different calami- 
ties, fires, earthquakes, and the ravages of wild 
beasts. The hearts of the people were paralyzed 



LITANIES. 25 

with fear. It was then th'^t the holy bishop Mamer- 
tus betook himself to prayer for his sorrow-stricken 
flock. A heavenly inspiration came to him, and 
was at once acted on. He instituted three days 
of solemn prayer and penance, selecting for that 
purpose the Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday pre- 
ceding Ascension Thursday. The beneficial results, 
both spiritual and temporal, which followed proved 
how acceptable the work was to God. The other 
Churches of France hastened to adopt the practice, 
and, in 816, Pope St. Leo III. established it in 
Rome. Now it is universal in the Church under 
the name of the Kogation days. The Litany sung 
on these days is called the Mmor, because it was 
local and episcopal in its origin, whereas that on 
the festival of St. Mark was Roman and papal. . 

The Litany of the Blessed Virgin Mary has been 
recited from the earliest ages both in public and in 
private. Quarti is of opinion that it originated with 
the Apostles. It is called the Litany of Loretto 
because it is sung, every Saturday, with great 
solemnity in the Church of Loretto. This magni- 
ficent edifice incloses the Holy House of the Blessed 
Virgin, which was transported, by the ministry of 
Angels, from Judea to Italy, in the end of the thir- 
teenth century. 

3 



26 LITANIE8. 

The Litany of the Holy Name of Jesus contains 
the various attributes and praises of the Sacred 
Name. Every knee in heaven, on earth and in 
hell must bow at the name of Jesus, because in 
Him, and in Him only, is salvation and hope of 
life ; and therefore, with good reason, may we cry 
out, whenever it is mentioned, have mercy on us ! 

Rubxicians doubt whether this Litany is ap- 
proved by the Holy See. Pope Clement VI IL, in 
his Constitution Sanctissim2is, of the 6th of Sep- 
tember, 1601, says of L'tanies : " As many private 
individuals daily publish new Litanies, under pre- 
text of cherishing devotion, to such an extent that 
almost innumerable forms of Litanies are in vogue, 
some of which contain puerile sentiments, others 
dangerous ones, we, out of our pastoral solicitude, 
wishing to provide for true devotion, and the pro- 
per invocation of God and His saints, do order and 
command that whoever wishes to publish, or, if 
published, to recite, in churches, oratories, or pro- 
cessions, any other Litanies than those common 
and most ancient ones contained in Breviaries, 
Missals, Pontificals, and Rituals, and that of the 
Blessed Virgin, which is sung in the Holy House 
of Loretto, shall send such Litanies to the Congre- 
gation of Sacred Rites for approval, and, if neces- 



LITANIES. 27 

sary, for correction. He cannot, without the ap- 
probation of the aforesaid Congregation, publish 
them or recite them in public." 

This decree does not include the Litany of the 
Holy Name amongst those that are approved. 
Yet Ferraris says that it, and only it, is exempt 
from the general regulation, because it was ap- 
proved by Sixtus V., and enriched with three 
hundred days' indulgence, at the instance of the 
Barefooted Carmelites. But this is not conclusive, 
because the decree of Clement YIII. is later than 
the alleged grant of Sixtus, and it does not at all 
allude to the Litany of the Holy Name. In a 
book purporting to be a collection of authentic de- 
crees of the Sacred Congregation of Rites, we find 
under the word lAtany the following statement : 
Many princes and bishops of Germany begged the 
approval of Rome for the Litany of the Holy Name 
of Jesus on the ground that it was constantly re- 
cited, in public and in private, by the people under 
their care. The reply of the Congregation of Rites 
was : " The aforesaid Litany is to be approved, if 
his Holiness deems proper." It seems from the 
tenor of the passage that the petition was sent to 
the Pope personally, and by him transmitted to the 
Congregation of Rites for examination. In a note 



28 LITANIES. 

to this passage the following query and answer 
occur : Litanice SS. Nominis Jesu sunt ne ajppro- 
batae, indulgentiisqite ditatae ^ Besjp: Negative 
in minibus. Die 7 Sept., 1850 in Buppellen ad 8. 
Are the Litanies of the Holy Name of Jesus ap- 
jproved and enriched with indulgences ? Reply : 
No, in regard to each case. But we are not at 
liberty to argue that they are disapproved. The 
practical conclusion to be drawn seems to be, that 
the Litany in question ought not to be recited in 
public functions, but that it may be recited in 
private. The decree of Clement VIIL speaks only 
oi public recitation : in publicum edere aut publice 
recitare prossumat. The Constitution Immensa 
ceterni I)ei of Sixtus V., 22d January, 1857, re- 
stricts the jurisdiction of the Congregation of Rites 
to public functions and ceremonies. 

It is plain to Catholic common sense that we 
ought to prefer an indulgenced formulary of prayer 
to one not indulgenced. The Litany of the Holy 
Name is not indulgenced, according to the decree 
of 1850, and therefore it must yield precedence to 
that of the Saints and that of the Blessed Virgin. 

What we have said of it applies with greater 
force to the numerous Litanies of individual Saints 
with which our prayer-books abound. Have they re- 



LITANIES. 29 

ceived the approbation of the Congregation of Rites, 
in compliance with the decree of Clement VIII. ? 
Ought they to be recited in public without that 
approbation ? These are questions, which we leave, 
as in filial reverence bound, to the decision of com- 
petent eccJesiastical authority. 

In regard to private recitations, we would coun- 
sel the use of such Litanies as are certainly ap- 
proved and indulgenced in preference to those 
whose claims to these privileges are, at best, doubt- 
ful. 

The faithful should not add, of their own devo- 
tion, the name of their patron saint, or any other 
petition to the Litanies of the Saints and of Loretto. 
Let all us endeavor, even in these minor points of 
discipline, to conform to the spirit of the Church. 

An liceat titulo specialis devotionis Litaniis 
Sanctorum vel Lauretanis aliquem versicidum ad- 
dere, vel novas lAtanias de quarmn approhatione 
Ordinario nullatenus constet, in Ecclesiis canere 
vel recitare ? 

Resp : Negative et serventur omnino decreta 
S. R. C, curentque Ordinarii colligere et vetare 
formulas quascumgue tam impressas quam manu- 
scriptas Litaniarum, de quarmn approhatione non 
constat Die 31 Martii 1821. Decretum geneeale 
AD 8. (4428.) A see Appendix. 



IL 



THE ANGELUS. 

This prayer, so called from the Latin word with 
which it begins, is one of the most popular in use 
amongst the faithful and it has moreover received the 
approbation of several Popes. It is said three times 
a day, morning, noon and evening, in honor of the In- 
carnation of our Lord. It is composed of three Hail 
Maries, preceded by a versicle and response taken 
from the words which Holy Scripture uses in describ- 
ing the visit of the Archangel Gabriel to the Blessed 
Virgin, announcing to her that she was to become 
the Mother of God. The Angel of the Lord de- 
clared unto Mary — and she conceived hy the Holy 
Ghost. Hail Mary, etc. Behold the handmaid of 
the Lord — be it done unto me according to thy 

word. Hail Mary, etc. And the Word was 
30 



THE ANGELUS. 31 

made flesh— and dwelt among us. Hail Mary, 
etc. 

The Incarnation is both the basis and the com- 
pletion of Christianity. Without that mystery 
Christ would not be, and therefore His Religion 
could have no existence. Christ is the name not 
of the Eternal Word, but of the Eternal Word, 
the second Person of the Blessed Trinity, made 
Man. If there had been no Incarnation, human 
nature would not have been assumed, and there 
would have been no Christ. What the world would 
have been without an Incarnate God we do not 
know, but we do know that it is now in possession 
of infinite treasures of grace, each of which is the 
germ of many degrees of heavenly glory, all of 
which proceed from the merits of Jesus Christ the 
Man-God. Hence all practical religion can be re- 
duced to faith in the Incarnation and love of it. 
He who believes this Adorable Mystery with a liv- 
ing supernatuTal belief is irresistibly impelled by 
the religious cravings of his mind and heart to 
admit an infallible Church and the Mystery of the 
Blessed Eucharist. God's works of love succeed 
each other in an increasing ratio ; each seems to 
surpass its predecessor in its manifestation of divine 
beauty and condescension. The Law of Moses, 



32 THE ANGELUS. 

though one of fear, was a greater revelation of 
love than the Law of Nature. Christ's Law of 
Grace is the reality and the substance of which the 
Mosaic Dispensation was the type and the shadow. 
There are these three — Nature, Grace and Glory, 
and of these the greatest is Glory. 

Let us apply this canon of divine action to the 
Incarnation. Earth was once blessed with the pre- 
sence of the God-Man. The mountain winds of 
Judea had heard the breathings of His midnight 
prayer, the storm-lashed waves of its lakes had 
obeyed His voice and lulled themselves to rest, His 
feet had wandered through its fields and villages 
and towns, His words of peace and hope and love 
had echoed in the ears and spoken to the hearts of 
its people. But He stayed not always ; He passed 
away from earth to His rest in the Bosom of His 
Father. Was God's usual loving mode of proce- 
dure to be reversed ? Were the world's future 
ages to look upon the Incarnation as a past historic 
fact, just as the Patriarchs and the Prophets had 
looked fonvard to it as future ? Men once had 
their Jesus amongst them, were they and their 
children to lose Him ? Ah no ! our Lord is too 
good. He would not leave His children orphans. 
The Incarnation is an abiding fact on earth, in the 



THE ANGELUS. 33 

Church and in the Blessed Sacrament. There is a 
divine and a human element in the Church, just 
as there is the Divine and the Human Nature in 
Jesus Christ. Its divine element is its infalli- 
bility and its sacraments, or, in one word, the 
Papacy ; its human element, its individual human 
members. And what is the Blessed Sacrament 
but Jesus Himself, the Incarnate God, dwelling 
with His own unto the end ! 

The Angelus is the prayer of the Incarnation ; 
this suffices to recommend it to the reverence and 
love of the faithful. The thrice-renewed daily 
sound of the Angelus bell is, in Catholic countries, 
the signal for general prayer. From the soaring 
spire of Gothic Cathedral, from the modest belfry 
of the village church, from convent, school and 
hospital, the blessed notes of the Angelical saluta- 
tion float out on the breezes of heaven. For a 
moment " labor ceases to knock with her hundred 
hands at the portals of morn, noon and even." 
Prince and people, rich and poor fall on their knees 
and bend their heads in prayer ; they hail the ad- 
vent of the Word made Flesh. 

This beautiful devotion prevails to a great extent 
even among us, though so far removed in distance, 
but not in love, we trust, from the associations and 



34 THE ANGELUS. 

traditions of Catholic Europe. The Angelas is 
regularly rung from our steeples, but still we do 
not obey the holy invitation to the extent we 
might. It is not required, of course, that we 
should expose ourselves and our religion to insult 
by kneeling down in the streets of a Protestant or 
infidel city at the sound of the Angelus bell, but 
does any valid reason exist why we should not 
say the prayer at home, faithfully and devoutly ? 
Could we not say it when walking along the streets^ 
and even take off the hat at the versicle : The 
Word was made Flesh, without at all attracting 
observation ? 

Benedict XIIL, by a brief, dated Sept. 14, 1724, 
granted a plenary indulgence once a month, on th e 
usual conditions^ to those who say the Angelus 
three times a day, and a partial indulgence of one 
hundred days for each recitation. 

Benedict XIV. has decided that the Angelus is 
to be said standing on Saturday evening and the 
whole of Sunday, but at all other times kneeling. 
In Lent, however, it is to be said standing on Sa- 
turday at noon, because first Vespers have already 
begun. 

The anthem Regina coeli is to be said, in stand- 
ing posture, in place of the Angelus, during the 



THE ANGELU9. 35 

Paschal time, that is from Vespers of Holy Satur- 
day to the 1st Vespers of Trinity Sunday. They 
who do not know the Begina coeli may continue to 
recite the Angelus and gain the indulgences. Per- 
sons residing in places where the Angelus-bell is not 
rung, or who cannot hear it, do not lose the indul- 
gences, if they are faithful to recite the prayer 
moroing, noon and evening. 

The Popes suspend indulgences for the living 
during the Jubilee or Holy Year, which occurs 
.every twenty-fifth year. This is done in order to 
make the faithful more eager to gain the indul- 
gence of the Jubilee. The Angelus, however, is 
exempted from this general regulation as a mark 
of the peculiar favor with which it is regarded by 
the Holy See. 



III. 
HYMNS. 

Amongst the Pagans a hymn meant a song or 
ode of praise in honor of their gods or heroes. In 
Christian language it means a poem in praise of 
God or His saints, or of some mystery of the 
Christian faith. 

The chanting of hymns has at all times formed 
a part of divine worship. When the children of 
Israel saw the hosts of the Egyptians dead on the 
shore of Red Sea, and the mighty hand that the 
Lord had used against their enemies, they cele- 
brated His triumph and expressed their gratitude 
in a magnificent canticle composed by their in- 
spired leader, Moses. Let us sing to the Lordyfor 
He is gloriously inagnijied. All the Psalms of David 

are hymns, as far surpassing in beauty and sublim- 
36 



HYMNS. 37 

ity the poetry of earth as the words of God surpass 
the words of man. The mournful notes of super- 
natural sorrow, the exultation of unshaken faith, 
the breathings of hope, the aspirations of ecstatic 
love commingle in the odes and lyrics of the Royal 
Psalmist to form a unity of heavenly music and 
poetry which masters the Christian soul with the 
power of Divinity. 

The Canticle of Anna, the mother of Samuel, the 
Magmjicat of the Blessed Virgin, the hymn said 
by Jesus Christ and His Apostles, after participat- 
ing of the Bread of Angels at the Last Supper, are 
Scriptural proofs of the propriety of sacred song as 
a mode of religious worship. 

The Council of Braganza, held in 553, forbade 
any poetical composition to be sung in the churches, 
(with the exception of the Psalms and other parts 
of the Old and New Testament,) In the following 
century, however, the Council of Toledo removed 
the prohibition in favor of hymns composed by dis- 
tinguished writers. 

Still it is probable that hymns were not inserted 
in the Roman Breviary until the thirteenth century, 
as we find no authentic mention or existing monu- 
ment of the fact until that period. Urban VIII., 
who reigned in the seventeenth century, appointed 



38 HYMNS. 

three members of the Society of Jesus to revise the 
hymns of the Breviary. The present forms of these 
sacred poems are due to their labors. 

The ecclesiastical hymns are not compositions of 
the same author or of the same period. Some 
date from the third or fourth century, others from 
the seventeenth, and perhaps some even from the 
eighteenth century. St. Ambrose, Prudentius, 
Venerable Bede, Sedulius, Paulinus,Venantius For- 
tunatus, Rabanus, Strabo, Fulbertus of Chartres, 
John the Deacon, St. Bernard and St. Thomas of 
Aquin, have all contributed their flowers of poetry 
to the Anthology of the Church. These are un- 
known names to some of our readers, but those that 
bore them were true poets and faithful followers of 
the Cross of Christ, the ever-flowiog fountain of 
high poetic inspiration. Were their lot cast in our 
days many a literary star would pale before their 
brighter splendors. 

Some of our hymns have never been rivaled by 
ancient or modern uninspired bard. We would 
instance the Te Deum, the joint composition of St. 
Augustine and St. Ambrose, on the occasion of the 
baptism of the former by the latter, in the end of 
the fourth century ; the Vexilla Begis of Venan- 
tius Fortunatus, Bishop of Poitiers, towards the 



HYMNS. 39 

middle of the sixth century ; the Ave Maris Stella 
and the Stahat Mater of Pope Innocent III., in 
the beginning of the thirteenth century ; the- Veni 
Creator Spiritus, which some authors have attri- 
buted to St. Ambrose, Archbishop of Milan, and 
others to Charlemagne ; and finally the glorious 
hymns of the Blessed Sacrament, the Pange Linguay 
the Verhiim Sitper.num, and the Laucla Sion, the 
compositions of the angelic doctor, St. Thomas of 
Aquin. There is a strain of unearthly majesty 
and triumph breathing through the last-mentioned, 
that, in our estimation, makes it the most sublime 
hymn in the Liturgy. It is said that the solemn 
music t ) which it is set is the same that was chanted 
in the triumphant processions of Rome's conquer- 
ing generals. 

In the Deer eta Authentica S. R. C, an abridge- 
ment of the great ritual work of Gardellini, we find 
under the word Cantiones the following decrees : 

An conveniat cantare aliqiias cantiones vidgari 
sermone, non tamen prof anas, in festivitate SS. 
Sacramenti, etc J 

Resp : JVon convenire Die. 21 Martii 1609 in 
Abulem (258.) 

Episcopus jpetiit : An sibi liceat proMbere Be- 



40 HYMNS. 

gularibus suce dicecesis, ne in ipsorum Ecclesiis 
canant laudes idiomate vidgari comjpositas ? 

Resp : Episcojmm posse auctoritate Jiujus Con- 
gregationis dictas laudes proliibere etiam Regular- 
ibus. Die 7 Aug. 1628 in Novarien (618.) 

An in henedictione populo impertienda cum 
Augustissimo Eucharistce Sacramento^ permitti 
possit cantus alicujus versicuU vernacula lingua 
concepti : vel ante, vel post ipsam benedict ioneni ^ 

Resp : Fennitti posse post henedictioneni. Die 
3. Aug. 1839 in Bohien ad 2 (4711.) 

These decrees apply, we think, only to public 
ecclesiastical functions, strictly so-called, and not 
to Sunday-schools, Sodalities, and Confraternities. 
If we are correct in our surmise, sacred canticles in 
the mother tongue may be sung by the members 
of such associations. The Holy Ghost tells us that 
praise is not seemly in the mouth of sinners; where 
then can it be more beautiful and touching than 
when it echoes from the lips of innocent chi'dren ? 
We ought, by all means, to encourage a taste for 
singing amongst our young people. It will enable 
them to take an active part in divine worship and 
enhance its solemnity, and it will be a source of 
holy enjo^Tnent to themselves and others. 



IV. 
THE CONFITEOR. 

This, like many other prayers of the Church, 
receives its name from the Latin word with which 
it begins, Confiteor, I confess. It is a general 
avowal of sins, in the presence of God, of the 
Church Triumphant in heaven and of the Church 
Militant on earth. The reciter thrice strikes his 
breast, in acknowledgment of the three kinds of sins 
of which he has been guilty, — of thought, of word 
and of deed,; — and concludes by begging the inter- 
cession of the Blessed Virgin, of the Saints and of 
his brethren on earth. 

The Cmifiteor is one of the Liturgical prayers, 
and hence a Sacramental. It is said by the cele- 
brant and assistant ministers at Mass, in that part 
of the Divine Office called Comjoline, and some- 

4 



42 THE CONFITEOR, 

times, also, at Prime. The learned and pious 
Cardinal Bona says, in his book de Rebus Litur- 
giciSy that some writers have attributed the author- 
ship of this prayer to Pope St. Pontianus, others 
to Pope St. Damasus. The former Pontiif reigned 
from 230 to 235 ; the latter from 3G6 to 384. 
"I am convinced," continues His Eminence, "that 
some general formula of confession was in use from 
Apostolic times, but I am unable to decide whether 
the one we now have originated with Pontianus 
or Damasus, because ancient writers say nothing 
of the matter." 

The priests and prophets of the Old Law made a 
general confession of their sins before praying or 
offering sacrifice : ^eccavimus, Bomine, injuste 
egimus, iniquitatem fecimus — we have sinned^ 
Lordy we have acted unjustly^ we have done 
iniquity. All the ancient Liturgies contain a Con- 
fiteor, different in words, but not in sentiments, from 
the one now in use. An abiding sorrow for sin and 
confession of it are essential elements of Christian 
holiness ; no system of worship is sound which does 
not, at least implicitly, contain them. The prac- 
tice of striking the breast, in token of repentance, 
is based on natural reason. Scripture and tradition. 
The heart, the seat of the passions both good and 



THE CONFITEOR. 43 

bad, is in the breast. When the intellect sins by 
pride or curiosity, it but follows the prompdngs of 
the heart. It is right then that we should strike 
the breast rather than any other part of the body. 
By doing so, we show that we wish to rend our 
hearts, that our contrition is not of the lip but of 
the heart The humble publican who went down 
to his house justified rather than the proud Phari- 
see struck his breast when he prayed, God he 
merciful to me a sinner (St. Luke, xviii. 13.) 
Those who witnessed the prodigies which followed 
the death of Christ on Calvary returned home, 
striking their breasts. St. Gregory Nazianzen, a 
Father of the 4th century, says (Orat. 15): "Let 
us, clothed with sackcloth, enter the temple, and 
day and night strike our breasts between the steps 
and the altar." St. Augustine bears testimony to 
the existence of the same practice in his time. 



THE BENEDICTIONS OF THE CHUECH. 



THE 

BENEDICTIONS OF THE CHURCH. 

Holy Mother Church wishes everything her 
children use to be holy, to be a help to Heaven. 
Her Ritual contains prayers for invoking blessings 
on the animate and inanimate objects which serve 
them in daily life — animals, fields, houses, the first 
fruits of the harvest and vintage and the various 
articles of food. The Devil but too frequently em- 
ploys these creatures to lead us into sin, but the 
Church, by her benedictions, consecrates them and 
thus neutralizes his power and shields us from his 
snares. She stamps them with the seal of Christ, 
that we may know that all these things belong to 
Him and are to be used for His glory. 

But besides these material things used for 



48 THE BENEDICTIONS OF THE CHURCH. 

the ordinary purposes of life, there are others, 
which, after they are blessed, the Church considers 
peculiarly sacred, such as the Agnus Dei, the Sca- 
pular, Holy Water, Holy Ashes, Palm Branches 
and Candles. These she would have us use for a 
directly religious end ; she wishes us to look upon 
them as symbols and memorials of sacred persons, 
events and truths. 



I. 



BLESSED CANDLES. 

The use of lights in religious worship is no new 
thing. We read in the 25th and 27th chapters of 
the Book of Exodus that God commanded Moses 
to make the seven-branched candlestick, in the 
lamps of which pure olive oil was to be constantly 
burned. It was the duty of the priests to enter 
daily into that part of the Tabernacle called the 
Holy where this candlestick was, and trim the 
lights, that they might ever burn bright and beauti- 
ful before the Lord. 

The voice of Catholic tradition attests the 
use of lights in the Christian Church from the 
Apostolic days. Si John describes, in the 1st 

5 



50 BLESSED CANDLES. 

chapter of th3 Apocalypse, the vision in which he 
saw the seven golden candlesticks. Now, the 
Li!^urgy of the Church Militant is a counterpart of 
that of the Church Triumphant, for Jesus in the 
Blessed Sacrament is Jesus who is in heaven ; hence 
commentators have gathered that in the time of 
St. John lights were used in the Eacharistic Sacri- 
fice. Incidental testimony of the early Fathers, 
which is all tho stronger for being incidental, and 
the authority of the ancient and venerable Apostolic 
canons establish the same truth. 

The heretic Vigilantius attacked, in the fourth 
century, the use of lights in the divine offices, but 
he was victoriously confuted by St. Jerome. The 
Saint informs us that " throughout the Churches of 
the East, whenever the Gospel is to be recited, 
they bring forth lights, not certainly to drive away 
darkness, but to manifest some sign of joy, that 
under the type of corporal light may be indicated 
thivt light of which we read in the Psalms : Thy 
word is a lamp to my feet and a light to my paths." 
What St. Jerome tells us of the practice of the 
Eastern Church, St. Paulinus, the amiable poet- 
bishop of Nola, tells us of the Western. We 
transcribe a translation of his beautiful Latin lines 
from Dr, Rock's Hierurgia : 



BLESSED CANDLES. 61 

With crowJed lamps are those bright altars crowned, 

And waxen t-ipers, shedding perfume round, 

From fragrant wicks, beam cahu a scented ray 

To gladden night and joy e'en radiant day. 

Meridian splendors thus light up the night, 

And day itself, illumed with Sacred Light, 

Wears a new glory, borrowed from those rays 

That stream from countless lamps in never-ending blaze. 

We shall no longer delay on the dogmatic proofs 
of the antiquity of lights in the Church, but hasten 
to more practical points. 

When our Lady went up to Jerusalem, forty 
days after Christmas, to make the offering pre- 
scribed by the Mosiac law for mothers after the 
birth of the first-born son, and the still more pre- 
cious offering of the Infant Jesus to His Eternal 
Father, the holy old man Simeon " camo by the 
Spirit into the temple." He took the sweet Child 
into his arms and blessed God and said : " Now 
dost thou disQiiss Thy servant, Lord, according 
t'j Thy words, in peace, because my eyes have seen 
Thy salvation, which Thou hast prepared before 
the face of all peoples ; a Light to the revelation 
of the Gentiles, and the glory of Thy people Israel." 
The Church calls us into the temple, on the Puri- 
fication, that our eyes too may see this glorious 



52 BLESSED CANDLES. 

Light, recognizing it in its symbol, the blessed 
Candle, that our hands too may hoLi the Infant 
Saviour, in holding the waxen taper which repre- 
sents Ilim. 

How full of meaning are all the rites of our holy 
religion ! Not by chance has the Church chosen 
the wax candle as a type of her Lord and Master. 
St. Anselm, of Canterbury, tells us the reason : 
The wax, product of the virginal bee, represents 
Christ's most spotless Body ; the wick, enclosed in 
the wax and forming one with it, images His human 
Soul, whilst the ruddy flame, crowning and com- 
pleting the union of wax and wick, typifies the 
Divine Nature, subsisting inconfused'y with the 
Human Nature in One Divine Person. 

Let us then make, on receiving our blessed candle, 
an act of faith in Christ the Light of the world 
'^ enlightening every man coming into this world." 
Let us remember that we are the "children of 
light," and that as such we ought to shed around 
us the light of good example. Oh ! dear readers, 
if our lives were as they should be, we would be like 
so many torches placed along the pathway of truth, 
to show our poor erring countrymen the way to the 
glorious city of God, the Holy Roman Catholic 
Apostolic Church. 



BLESSED CANDLES. 53 

We should make, on this festival, an offering of 
candles for the service of the Altar.* Oh ! what 
a consoling thought for us when we are at our 
daily work, to think that perhaps our candles are 
at that moment burning before the Blessed Sicra- 
ment, taking the place of our hearts, silently, 
purely burning in their stead before the Sacred 
Heart of Jesus. 

Nor should we forget ourselves ; we ought to 
have, at least, one blessed candle for our own 
private use, to take to our houses, to burn before 
the Crucifix or an image of the Blessed Virgin, 
to remind us that our souls, like it, ought to be 
consuming the dross of earthly affection, in the 
pure, heaven-aspiring flame of love. 

We must pnt confidence in these holy candles, 
for the prayers of the Church have ascended to 
God, that " He would bless and sanctify them for 
the service of men and for the good of their bodies 
and souls in all places." Pious Catholics light 
them during thunder storms, that God, in consi- 
deration of Christ, whom they represent, may 
deign to protect His servants. Let us light them 
whenever we are threatened with calamity, and if 

* They should be of wax — such is the wish of the Church. 



54 BLESSED CANDLES. 

we do so in a spiiifc of faith, we shall experience 
signal proofs of God's fatherly care of us. But 
above all let the holy candle burn by the bedside 
of the sick and the dying, dispelling by its 
blessed light the shades of trouble and despair 
which the Prince of darkness strives to cast around 
the Chrisfcian soul in the hour of its dissolution, 
and illumining the dark road, through the valley 
of death to the mountain whose light is God. 

(B see Appendix.) 



n. 



HOLY WATER. 



Both the Jews and the Gentiles used lustral 
water in their religious ceremonies. The former 
did so by the express command of God ; the latter 
borrowed the rite from the Jews, or adopted it from 
the evident symbolism of water, its natural fitness 
for expressing the cleansing of the soul. We must 
recollect that the Mosaic Liturgy preceded, by 
centuries, the culmination of polytheism and hero- 
worship, in the refined mythologies of Greece and 
Rome. For ourselves, however, we are inclined to 
adopt the second explanat'on. The tradition of 
the Fall and of the necessity of expiation was 
handed down, in substantial integrity, from gener- 
ation to generation, and endured in spite of the 
corrupting influences of the dominant Pagan super- 



56 HOLY WATER. 

stition. The offering of bloody sacrifices and Ihe 
sprinkling of water on things and persons were 
sensible expressions of man's conviction of his sin- 
fulness and of bis need of purification. When the 
Catholic Church uses Holy Water in her benedic- 
tions, when she bids her children reverence it and 
apply it to their persons, she is not copying a 
Jewish or Pagan rite ; she is but expressing a 
truth, detached from the mists which hung around 
it for the common run of Hebrew minds, and from 
the errors with which Gentilism disfigured it — the 
Fall of Adam and the consequent mystery of 
Redemption. The religious ceremonies of the 
ancient world prefigured the Messiah and the graces 
of the Incarnation ; those of the Church represent 
Him as present in the Blessed Eucharist and apply 
His graces. 

We said that God commanded the Jews to use 
water in the performance of sacred rites. ''Water 
being j^ut into it, (the brazen laver which stood 
between the tabernacle and the altar,) Aaron and 
his sa)is shall wash their hands and feet in it, when 
they are going into tlie tahernacle of the testimony, 
and when they are to come to the altar, to offer on 
it incense to the Lord, lest jjerha^s they die, 
(Exodus XXX., 18, 19, 20, 21.) The nineteenth 



HOLY WATER. 67 

chapter of the Book of Numbers contains the law 
coccerning the water of expiation. Christ has 
sanctified water by making it the matter of Baptism 
and bj the contact of His own Sacred Body in the 
river Jordan. 

The present rite of blessing water, by prayer and 
an admixture of salt, is frequently referred to Pope 
St. Alexander I., who reigned from 109 to 119. 
Fornici, in his Institutiones Liturgicce, says : 
" From the words which St. Alexander uses, in his 
decree, it would appear that the rite is more ancient 
than the time of that Pontiff: ^ We hless^for the 
use of the people, water sjprinMed with salt ' . . and 
we command the same to he done by all priests,'''' 
He does not say : " We decree that water shall 
he Messed but we hless, to indicate a ceremony 
already in use." It is more probably that the rite 
is of Apostolic origin. 

There are three kinds of holy water : 1st, bap- 
tismal water; 2d, that which can be blessed only 
by a bishop; and 3d, common holy water which 
may be blessed by a priest. 

The first, which, as its name indicates, is used 
in conferring the Sacrament of Bapt'sm, is publicly 
blessed on the eves of Easter and Pentecost either 
by bishop or priest. The Oil of Catechumens and 



58 HOLY WATER. 

Chrism are mixed with it. The abridgment of the 
Roman Ritual, used in the United States, contains 
a formula, approved by Pope Pius VIII., to be 
employed in private benediction of baptismal water. 

The water used in consecrating churches and in 
reconciling consecrated churches which have been 
profaned is blessed by a bishop. It is called 
Gregorian water, because Pope Gregory IX. made 
its use obligatory for the purposes specified. Wine, 
ashes and salt are mingled with it. 

Common holy water, wljich a priest may bless, 
contains a small quantity of salt. It is this which 
is placed at the doors of churches, and which is used 
in most ecclesiastical benedictions. 

The union of water and salt is not without 
mystery. The property of the first is to cleanse, 
of th second to preserve. The Church wishes 
that this Sacramental should help to wash away 
sin from her children and to preserve them from a 
relapse. Water quenches fire and fosters the 
growth of plants ; thus, in the spiiitual order, holy 
water serves to quench the fire of the passions and 
to promote the growth of virtues. 

Salt is the symbol of wisdom ; it typifies the 
Eternal Wisdom, the Second Person of the Blessed 
Trinity. Water represents human nature. Hence 



HOLY WATER. 59 

the mingling of the two substances is emblematic 
of the Incarnaton, of the assumption of human 
nature by the Eternal Word. Water represents 
repentance for past offences ; salt, from its preserv- 
ative properties, represents the care which the true 
penitent takes to avoid future falls. 

There is a remarkable instance in the Fourth 
Book of Kings (2d chapter) of the sacred efficacy 
which God attaches to salt. The inhabitants of 
Jericho complained to the prophet Eliseus that the 
water of their town was bad and the ground barren. 
The holy man then said to them : bring me a new 
vessel and put salt into it. And when they had 
brought it, he went out to the spring of the waters 
and cast the salt into it, and said : Thus saith the 
Lord : I have healed these waters, and there shall 
be no more in them death or barrenness. 

The water and salt are both exorcised before 
being blessed, that is, the evil spirit is commanded, 
in the name of the true and living God, to witl> 
draw any power he m^y have over these sub- 
stances. The prayers which the priest then recites 
over them beautifully express the spiritual effects 
which the Church wishes them to produce, and 
which, in virtue of her benediction, they will pro- 
duce, unless the unworthy dispositions of the Mth- 
ful prevent The benediction of the salt is as fol- 



60 HOLY WATER. 

lows: "Almifijhty and Eternal God! we humbly 
implore Thy boundless clemency, that Thou wouldst 
mercifully deign to bless and sanctify this salt, 
Thy creature, which Thou hast given for the use 
of mankind, that it may bring solvation of mind 
and body unto all that take it ; and that whatever 
is touched or sprinkled with it, may be freed from 
all uncleanness and from all attacks of spiritual wick- 
edness." We see from this prayer that the Church 
begs God to attach a triple efficacy to blessed salt: 
1st, that it may be a means of salvation to the 
soul ; 2d, that it may be a preservative against 
corporal dangers ; 3d, that it may sanctify every 
thing with which it comes in contact. It does not 
produce these effects of itself, as a Sacrament does, 
but it obtains actual graces for the pious user, which 
will, if co-operated with, obtain them. The same 
remark applies to the efficacy of the water. 

The prayer for the blessing of this latter sub- 
stance is this : " Oh God ! Who, for the salvation 
of mankind, hast wrought many great mysteries 
and miracles, by means of the substance water, 
listen propitiously to our invocations, and infuse 
into this element, prepared by manifold purifica- 
tions, the power of Thy benediction : in order that 
Thy creature (water) being used as an instrument 



Ht^LY WATER. 61 

of Thy hidden works, may be efficacious in driv- 
ing away devils and curing diseases ; that what- 
ever in the houses or in the places of the faithful 
shall have been sprinkled with this water, may 
be freed from all uncleanness and delivered from 
all guile : let no pestilential spirit reside there, 
no infectious air : let all the snares of the hidden 
enemy be removed ; and if there should be any 
thing adverse to the safety or repose of the in- 
dwellers, may it be put entirely to flight, by the 
sprinkling of this water, that the welfare which we 
seek, by the invoc-ition of Thy holy Name, may be 
defended from all assaults ; through our Lord 
Jesus Christ, etc." This formula of prayer im- 
plores the following effects for holy water: 1st, to 
drive away the devils ; 2d, to cure diseases ; 3d, 
to free houses and tlieir contents from all evil, 
particularly from a plague-infected atmosphere. 
After these prayers the priest puts a little salt into 
the water, saying, " May this commingling of salt 
and water be made in the Name of the Father and 
of the Son and of the Holy Ghost." 

Let us consider now the uses of Holy Water. 
The Church employs it in nearly all her benedic- 
tions, the longest and most solemn as well as the 
shortest and last sacred. Her reverence for it 



62 HOLY WATER. 

seems to equal that which she p ys to the holy 
sign of the cross. She prescribes, in the rubrics of 
the Missalj that one of her ministers shall bless 
water, on every Sunday, before High Mass, 
and then proceed to sprinkle it over the clergy, 
and the faithful.* She thereby admonishes her 

* The rubric of the Missal de ordine adfaciendani aquam 
henedictam is as follows: Die Dominica f in sacrist ia prat' 
parato sale et aqua hcMedicenda^ sacerdos celehraturus Mis- 
sam, vel alius ad id deputafuSj aiha, vel superpelliceo 
iudutus cum stola circa collumj prima dicit, etc. If the 
celebrant perlbrms the function, the stole must be of the 
color of the day; if another priest, the stole ought to bo 
purple. As a general rule purple is to be used in all bene- 
dictions in which exorcisms enter. Abbe Guillois, in the 
fourth volume of his Catechism says: "Liturgists all iigree 
that holy water is to be blessed every Sunday before High 
Mass; Singulis diebus dominicis fieri debet benedictio aquae 
lustralis, atque adeo renovari singulis hebdomadis, projecta in 
sacrarium alia praecedentis hebdomadae. Quarti — Adeo 
rigorosum est praeceptum de benedicenda aqua singulis die- 
bus dominicis, ut nunquara oraitti debeat — BaruffaJdi.'^ 
The Missal excepts two Sundays from this general regula- 
tion, Easter and Pentecost, because water has been solemnly 
blessed on the eves of these festivals, and the Caeremoniale 
Episcoporum excepts all those on which the bishop celebrates 
solemnly. The benediction is o^ precept on Sunday, it may 
however be performed, if the holy water should be exhausted, 
on any other day. . . . The Sacred Congregation of 



HOLY WATER. 

children to purify their hearts by the waters of 
contrition, in order that they may assist without 
blame at the venerable mysteries of the Eucharistic 
Sacrifice. She places vases of holy water in the 
vestibules of her temples to teach those who enter 
that they ought to be clean of hand and cleaner 
of thought and affection if they wish to stand in 
the midst of the adoring bands of angels who cluster 
around the altar of the Mass. This custom of put- 
ting holy water at the entrance of the church dates 
from the earliest ages. 

Our reverence for holy water should be modeled 
on that of the Church. We ought to make this 
Sacramental as ubiquitous as the crucifix or the 

Rites has prescribed the following rules for the aspersion 
before Mass : 1st, It is to be performed only by the celebrant ; 
2d, Celebrans aspergens populuni aqua benedicta associari 
debet a diacono et subdiacono et ministris altaris et recitare 
psalmuni Miserere, Die 31, Jidii 1665 in Wullius ad 13 ; 
3d, Ritus aspergendi aqua benedicta populum restringitur ad 
dies Dominicos tantum, (hence it is not to be done on 
holidays of obligation occurring during the week) ; 4th, 
This is prescribed by the Missal : Sacerdos celebraturus 
facit aspersionera indutus pluviali coloris officii. . . We 
give one more decree for the benefit of our clerical readers ; 
In ultimo Majoris Hebdomadae triduo removenda est a vasis 
ecclesise aqua benedicta. 



64 HOLY WATER. 

cross. No Catholic family should be without a 
vase of holy water, and one too which is kept for 
use not merely for ornament. Thank God ! our 
Catholic poor are exemplary in their devotion for 
the sacred things of the Church. Many a good 
old dame is richer in her rosary, her cross and her 
holy water than some of her brethren in the faith 
are in their learning. Let us love knowledge, not 
that which puffeth up, but that which edifieth unto 
charity. Then we shall learn to love the Sacra- 
mentals of the Church ; we shall become poor in 
spirit and merit the blessing pronounced by our 
Divine Lord on those who have learnt from Him 
to be meek and humble of heart. 

(C. See Appendix.) 



m 

HOLY ASHES. 

Ashes have at all times symbolized humiliation 
and mourning. The Royal Prophet David declared 
unto God that, in the affliction of his heart, he 
" did eat bread like ashes " (Ps. ci. 10), and when 
this good king had been gathered to his fathers, 
his penitential deed was imitated in part by the 
Gentile monarch of Nineve, who " rose up out of his 
throne," on the preaching of Jonas, " and cast away 
his robe from him a ad was clothed in sackcloth and 
sat in ashes " (Jonas iii. 6.) The Eastern custom 
of sprinkling dust, or ashes, on the head, of sitting 
in ashes or casting them up into the air, is, to this 
day, a manifestation of true or feigned grief of 
heart. 

The Saints knew well the holy significancy of 

ashes ; they knew that they are memorials of the 

6 



66 HOLY ASHES. 

origin of man's body and its destiny, of Christian 
lowliness of heart, and hence we read in their lives 
that they wished to die on a bed of ashes. Their 
souls, released from their mortal prisons, rose 
triumphantly to heaven from the ashes of humility, 
of which the material ashes are the types, bright 
and glorious, like the fabled Phoenix of olden story. 

" In the midst of the large infirmary of the Ab- 
bey of Cluny," says De Moleon, in his Liturgical 
Travels, " there is a hollow place six feet long and 
about two and a half or three feet wide, in which 
religious in their last agony were laid, after it 
had previously been covered with ashes. The 
present custom, however, is not to put them in it 
until after death. Some communities of Carthu- 
sians and Trappists make their dying brethren pass 
through the same solemn ceremony." What 
cruelty ! say the votaries of the world — what true 
charity! say the children of God. These good 
monks thought more of their souls than of their 
bodies ; ashes are one of the medicines of the soul, 
curing it of the vain-glory that the retrospect of a 
well spent life may occasion, and therefore the 
monks loved to use them. 

The present rite of the Church of signing the 
foreheads of her children with blessed ashes, in 



HOLY ASHES. 67 

the beginning of the Lenten fast, is a remnant of 
the ancient penitential discipline. In the good old 
times, when the faithful were more fervent, when 
they understood better the malice of sin and had 
a deeper horror of it, public penance for certain 
crimes was ordained by the Church, and, for the 
most part, willingly accepted and faithfully per- 
formed. The sorrowing sinner looked upon admis- 
sion to the penitential course as a precious boon, 
as a hope held out of his reinstatement in the 
enjoyment of those spiritual goods which he had 
forfeited by his transgression. 

The course of penance for those who were to 
be reconciled on Holy Thursday began on Ash- 
Wednesday. The penitents, having confessed their 
sins, came to the Church on that day with bare 
feet and in habits of mourning, and humbly begged 
from the Bishop canonical punishment. The Pontiff 
clothed them in sackcloth, scattered ashes on their 
heads, sprinkled them with holy water and recited 
the Seven Penitential Psalms over them, whilst the 
attendant clergy lay proitrate on the ground. 
The Bishop and his ministers then imposed hands 
on them to ratify, as it were, their solemn conse- 
cration to the course of penance. This ceremony 
-was followed by a pathetic exhortation in which the 



68 HOLY ASHES. 

Bishop announced to the weeping sinners before 
him that as God had driven Adam from Paradise, 
80 was he obliged to exclude them for a time from 
the spiritual paradise of the Church. With sorrow- 
ing hearts and countenances the penitents marched 
in slow procession to the door of the Church. The 
Bishop thrust them out with his pastoral staff, and 
they passed not again the threshold of the house of 
God until Holy Thursday. During this touching 
ceremony the clergy chanted the words which God 
addressed to fallen man when driving him from the 
earthly paradise : " Thou shalt eat thy bread in 
the sweat of thy brow : remember that thou art 
dust and into dust thou shalt return." 

There existed in some dioceses, even as late as 
the last century, vestiges of the old custom. At 
Narbonne, public penitents abstained, during all 
Lent from entering the Church ; they recited 
prayers in their own houses during the celebration 
of Mass. In the collegiate church of Avalon, in 
the diocese of Autun, it was customary to distribute 
the ashes on the steps of the main entrance, in 
memory of the exclusion of the penitents from the 
Church. At Autun, a clergyman in cassock and 
surplice was the substitute for all the penitents ; he 
was driven from the church on Ash- Wednesday and 



HOLY ASHES. 69 

again admitted on Holy Thursday. In course of 
time many of the faithful, through a motive of 
humility, though not obliged to a course of public 
penance, presented themselves on the first day of- 
Lent to receive the ashes. This pious custom had 
spread in the eleventh century throughout the 
church, as appears from a decree of the Council 
of Benevento in 1091. 

The mildness of the Church in our regard, in 
contrast with her holy severity towards those of our 
forefathers in the faith, who unhappily sinned, yet 
perhaps far less grievously and less frequently than 
we, oughb to fill us with sentiments of deep humi- 
lity and gratitude. The sign of the holy ashes on 
our heads should remiad us of the desbiny of our 
earthly bodies — dust a ad worms. If we realize 
well this solemn truth, we shall undertake readily 
and joyously our Lenten work of fisting and pray- 
ing, hoping for a recompense beyond the grave 
when corruption will be changed into incorruption, 
when this mortal body will be clothed with immor- 
tality. 

The congregation of Rites,* by a decree of the 

* The congregatioa of Rites is composed of Cardinals and 
inferior officials j its object is the regulation of the ceremonies 
of divine worship. It was established by Pope Sixtus Y. ia 
1587. 



70 HOLV ASHE3. 

23(1 of May 1693, has forbidden the ashes that 
are to be placed on the heads of the faithful to be 
moistened with water ; they must be perfectly dry. 
The rubric of the Roman Missal prescribes that the 
ashes are to be got by burning the palm-branches 
blessed on Palm Sunday of the preceding year. 
In this we discover a holy symbolism. The palm 
is the emblem of triumph, ashes of humility and 
death to show that the term of earthly triumph is 
the tomb, of far-extending sway of earthly potent- 
ate, the coffin and the grave. But the blessed 
palm is an emblem of Christ's triumph, and its 
ashes are, as it were, its seeds, to teach us that we 
too shall participate in our Lord's triumph if we 
participate in His sufferings and His death by a 
true, solid devotion to His cross and by dying to 
ourselves. 



IV. 
OUR LORD'S CROSS. 

Most of the Sacramentals, though expressly 
mentioned, or, at least, foreshadowed in Holy Scrip- 
ture, are, in their present form, of ecclesiastical 
origin ; some few, however, were instituted by our 
Lord himself His act of ineffable condescension 
in washing the Apostles' feet had all the requisites 
of a Sacrament ; it was a sensible ceremony, per- 
formed by a Divine Person, and it was accom- 
panied by the remission of venial sin, and hence, 
necessarily, by an increase of sanctifying grace ; 
he that is washed needeth not but to wash his feet, 
but is clean loholly (St. John xiii. 10.) Yet the 
Church, enlightened by the teaching of the Holy 
Ghost, as coatainedin Apostolic tradition, does not 
count it amongst her Sacraments, It is a Sacra- 



72 OUR lord's cross. 

vuntal most instructive ia its mystic meaning, 
most rich in blessings, most venerable in its divine 
origin. 

Crosses and Crucifixes are Sacramentals of 
ecclesiastical institution, blessed by the prayers of 
the Church, moving the Christian soul, in virtue 
of Christ's true Cross, which they represent, to 
many a p'ous thought and many a holy deed. 
But that true Cross is holier than they inasmuch 
as the reality surpasses the figure. Not with the 
blood of goats or oxen, nor the sprinkling of holy 
water, nor the unction of holy chrism ; not by 
mortal priest or bishop or pope was it blessed, but 
with the Precious Blood shed for the world's re- 
demption, by the Great High Priest forever, 
accjrding to the order of Melchisedech, Jesus 
Christ our Lord. 

The old Romans looked on crucifixion as the most 
cruel and ignominious of punishments, fit only for 
slaves or the perpetrators of the most atrocious 
crimes. "Slaves, robbers, assassins and rebels," 
says Lamy, in his dissertation on the Cross, " were 
condemned to be crucified, and they hung on the 
instrument of their punishment until hunger, thirst 
or the cruel pains they endured killed them ; and 
"then their dead bodies were given as food to dogs 



OUR lord's cross. 73 

and crows." The celebrated passage in Cicero's 
oration against Verres shows us plainly in what 
horror crucifixion was held : " To bind a Roman 
citizen is unlawfal, to scourge him is an atrocious 
crime, to slay him is a parricide, but to crucify 
him! . . . what shall I call it?" Yet did the 
innocent Jesus vouchsafe to die this ignominious 
death for us sinners ! 

The two charges brought by the Jews against 
our Lord were blasphemy and treason. The Jews 
answered : We have a law, and according to the 
law He ought to die, because He made Himself 
the Son of God, (St. John, xix. 7.) We have 
found this man 'perverting our nation, and forhid-- 
ding to give tribute to Ccesar, and saying that He 
is Christ the King (St. Luke, xxiii. 2.) Accord- 
ing to the law of Moses stoning was the punish- 
ment of blasphemy and hence it was rather on the 
false charge of treason that Pilate, in his capacity 
of Roman Governor, condemned our Saviour to the 
Cross. 

Crosses are of several kinds : the Latin, the 
Greek, the transverse, the Egyptian and the Mal- 
tese. The Latin Cross, the one in use amongst 
us, consists of two beams cutting each other at 
right angles at about three quarters the length 

7 



74 OUR lord's cross. 

of the longer piece, as in figure (1.) Two equal 
(1) (2) (3) (4) (5) 




beams cutting each other in the centre form a 
Greek cross (2.) The transverse cross is in shape 
like the letter X ; it is called also St. Andrew's 
cross, because it was the instrument of that Apos- 
tle's martyrdom (3.) A cross like the letter T is 
called the Egyptian, or St. Anthony's cross (4.) 
The letter T is one of the component initials (th) of 
the Greek word for God : St. John tells us in the 
Apocalypse (vii. 3.) that the angel cried out : Hurt 
not the earthy nor the sea, nor the trees, till we sign 
the servants of our God in their foreheads, which, 
according to some interpreters, consists in the cor- 
poral or spuitual impress of the sacred letter T. 
Painters are wont to depict this letter on the robe 
of St. Anthony, the Egyptian hermit, or to give 
the crutch on which he leans this form, as an 
emblem of the divine life which he and his brethren 
of the desert led, and hence it has been called St. 
Anthony's cross. The Maltese cross consists of 



OUR lord's cross. -75 

four equilateral triangles the apices of which touch 
one another (5.) The tradition in the church is 
that our Lord suffered on the Latin cross. St. Au- 
gustine beautifully applies to the four extremities of 
the cross the text of St. Paul : That being rooted 
and foiinded in charity you may he able to com^pre- 
hend with all the Saints, what is tJie breadth and 
length and height and dej^th. (Eph. iii. 17, 18.) 
" The breadth means the good works of charity ; 
the length, perseverance in well-doing unto the 
end; the height, the hope of heavenly rewards; the 
depth, the inscrutable judgments of God, whence 
this so great a grace doth come to man : thus I 
apply the text to the mystery of the cross." 

The material of the Sacred Cross was probably 
oak, as this wood abounded in Judea, and would 
be moreover, from its strength, one of the most 
suitable of trees for bearing up the body of the 
crucified. There is, I believe, a touching and 
beautiful legend that seeds from the tree of the 
knowledge of good and evil, were borne by the 
waters of the flood, or other cause, to the moun- 
tain of Cavalry, and that from the offshoots thereof 
the Holy Cross was made. And if this be so, then 
would our Lord have nailed to the very tree which 
caused man's sin the cancelled record of that sin, 



76 OUR lord's cross. 

washing out the handwriting that was against us 
with His own most Precious Blood. 

The Cross was very high. The testimony of 
Holy Scripture in regard to the punishment of 
Aman, mentioned in the Book of Esther, and that 
of profane authors, quoted by Baronius, inform us 
that high crosses were reserved for criminals of 
noble birth. Surely He who was thought to be 
the son of Joseph the carpenter was not deemed 
of noble extraction by Jew or Roman, though 
in truth the blood of Juda's royal line flowed 
through His veins, though heaven and earth and 
hell owned Him their Lord and King. More- 
over, we know from the Evangelist St John that 
the title placed by Pilate on the Cross was read 
by the Jews, which could scarcely have been done, 
had ihQ Cross been very high. The letters of 
the title were not unusually large, as is proved 
by a fragment preserved in one of the churches 
of Rome. 

After our Lord's Body had been taken down 
from the Cross, the Jews buried the once disgrace- 
ful but now glorious instrument of death, together 
with the crosses of the two thieves and other relics 
of the Passion. They and the heathens were anxi- 
ous to obliterate all traces of the spot whereon the 



OUR lord's cross. 7r 

world's redemption had been consummated, and 
accordingly they filled the Holy Sepulchre with 
earth and erected over it a temple and a statue to 
the impure goddess Venus. For nearly three 
hundred years the abomination stood in the holy 
place. But when Constantine the Great became 
master of the Roman Empire, the death-knell of 
Paganism sounded and the moment of the Cross's 
triumph was approaching. The glorious cross, with 
the consoling inscription; in this thou shalt conquer, 
which appeared to hhn in 311, when he was march- 
ing against the tyrant Maxentius, had implanted in 
the Emperor's breast a profound veneration for the 
sacred instrument of man's redemption. When his 
mother, St. Helena, went to Palestine, about the 
year 326, with the design of rescuing the Holy 
Places from the neglect into which they had fallen, 
he seconded her to the full extent of his imperial 
power. She began her pious work by destroying 
the temple and the statue of Venus and excavating 
the ground on which they had stood. The Holy Se- 
pulchre was thus laid open, and near it were found 
three crosses and other implements of the Passion. 
Which cross was our Lord's was now the question. 
The Empress consulted St. Macarius, Bishop of 
Jerusalem, and he, by divine inspiration, directed the 



78 OUR lord's cross. 

three to be applied to the body of a noble matron 
who was lying dangerously sick. Two of the crosses 
produced no effect ; at the touch of the third she 
that was sick arose cured, thus attesting the power 
of the true Cross, which, because of Him who died 
on it, gave life to those for whom He died. 

A gorgeous temple, in honor of our Saviour was 
built over the sacred spot where the Cross, stood 
and in it a large portion of the revered relic was 
left by the good Empress. Another piece was sent 
to the Church of the Holy Cross in Rome, and a 
third to Constantinople. 

Near three hundred years again went by, and 
then the glories of Christ's true Cross were once 
more eclipsed, but only to beam forth with greater 
brightness. The Persian King Chosroes overran 
the Eastern provinces of the Greek empire and took 
Jerusalem in 624. His sacrilegious hands seized 
the true Cross and made captive the Patriarch 
Zachary. The relic and the Bishop were the two 
most valuable trophies that graced the triumphant 
return of the barbarian monarch to his own capital. 
Yet strange to say, Chosroes and his people held 
the sacred wood in profound veneration ; they 
never took it from the silver case in which St. 
Helena had enshrined it. But the King had com- 



OUR lord's cross. 79 

mitted sacrilege in carrying off the Cross, and the 
avenging arm of God smote him for his crime, even 
in this life. Heraclius, one of the ablest monarchs 
that ever sat on the throne of Constantinople, was 
now the Emperor of the East. His army was small, 
but he trusted in God, and a glorious victory over 
the Persians arms, in 627, was the reward of his 
confidence. Chosroes was lying dangerously ill at 
the time of his defeat, and fearing an approaching 
death or captivity, he made h s younger son his 
colleague in the government of Persia. The 
flames of jealousy and vengeance were lighted up 
in the bosom of Siroes, the elder son. He seized 
on his aged father and bound him in chains, and 
then ordered the young king to be slaughtered be- 
fore the eyes of his heart-broken parent. Death 
soon freed Chosroes from the cruel treatment of 
his guilty son. Siroes hastened to make peace 
with Heraclius, which he obtained on condition of 
restoring the Holy Cross and Patriarch Zachaiy 
and his fellow-Christian captives. 

Great was the joy of the Catholic world on the 
recovery of the precious relic. Heraclius caused 
medals, commemorating the event, to be struck a^ 
Constantinople, and then proceeded to Palestine to 
attend to the restoration of the Holy Places. On 



80 OUR lord's cross. 

his arrival at Jerusalem, he determined to bear the 
Cross on his own shoulder to the Church on Cal- 
vary. Clad in his imperial robes, all glittering with 
gold and jewels, he set out on his pious pilgrimage. 
But an invisible hand stopped him ; in vain did he 
endeavor to reach Calvary ; his feet refused to per- 
form their office. " Seest thou not, Emperor,'* 
said the Patriarch Zachary, " that thy gaudy ap- 
parel little beseemeth the poverty and humility of 
Jesus Christ ? In poor apparel and with bare feet 
He carried this Cross ; do thou the same." The 
Emperor obeyed ; he clothed himself in plebeian 
dress and cast oif his shoes, and then easily finished 
his route and deposited the Cross in the place from 
which the Persians had taken it. 

Centuries went by, and the Holy Cross remained 
undisturbed in Jerusalem, dearly prized by the 
Christians of Palestine as their most precious relic, a 
loadstone which drew, with sweet attraction, the ven- 
eration and love of Catholic hearts in the most dis- 
tant regions of the West. Then another storm came. 
The fiery zealots of the Koran poured out in im- 
petuous torrents from the deserts of Arabia, sweep- 
ing away, in their disastrous course, civilization and 
religion. To make sure of saving from profanation 



OUR lord's cross. 81 

and destruction a part at least of that piece of the 
Cross which they possessed, the Christians of Jeru- 
salem divided it into smaller portions and sent them 
to different churches, reserving some however for 
themselves. David, one of the kings of the 
Georgians, and who lived about the time of the first 
Crusade, got one of these holy relics. In 1109, 
ten years after the capture of Jerusalem by the 
Latin arms, Anseau, a canon of the church of Paris, 
obtained possession of this portion of the Holy Cross 
from the widow of the Georgian king. Anseau 
sent it to Galen, Bishop of Paris, to be presented 
by him to the chapter of the Cathedral. The Cross 
was faithfully preserved among the treasures of 
Notre Dame until the French revolution, when it 
fell into the hands of a commissary of the Sections. 
He restored it, with the exception of a small piece 
that he reserved for himself, and thus our Lord's 
Cross came back to its old home, our Lady's Church. 
Jesus and Mary are inseparable ; the Mother was 
with the Son at Bethlehem and on Calvary and is 
now in Heaven with Him. 

Paris has other portions of the Sacred Cross; 
some were sent to St. Louis by Baldwin IL, Em- 
peror of Constantinople, and one was donated by 



82 OUR lord's cross. 

the Princess Anne of Cleves to tlie Abbey of St. 
Germain-des-Pres.* 

We have already said that the church of the 
Holy Cross of Jersusalem in the city of Rome is 
blessed with a large piece of the cross, the gift of 
St. Helena. Relics of the same sacred wood, of 
minutely small dimensions, have been distributed 
throughout the Catholic world, aod if any of us 
should have the happiness of possessing one let us 
value it as a dear memorial of our Lord's Passion 
and Death. 

* The Chureh commemorates the finding of the Holy 
Cross, on the 3d of May, and its recovery from the Persians, 
on the 14th of September. 



V. 

THE CROSS AND THE CRUCIFIX. 

A CROSS with the representation of our Lord's 
Body attached to it is called a crucifix, one without 
it is simply a cross. Both claim the Christian's 
veneration and love because they are memorials of 
the true Cross and of Christ who died on it. Leon- 
tius. Bishop of Cyprus, thus explained, in the second 
of Nice, held in 787, the adoration paid to the cross 
and the crucifix : " He who receives an official 
document from the emperor venerates the seal, 
not because of the paper on which it is impressed, 
nor of the lead with which it is formed, but because 
of the emperor whose seal it is : in like manner we 
Christians, when adoring the figure of the cross, 
adore not the nature of wood, but the sign and the 
seal of Christ. Looking at it we salute and adore 



84 THE CROSS AND THE CRUCIFIX. 

Him who was crucified on it. As children, when 
they see the staff or the chair or the robe of a be- 
loved and absent father, kiss it with tears, through 
desire and veneration for their father ; so we adore 
the cross as the staff of Christ," 

The Church exposes the crucifix, on Good Friday, 
to the public and solemn adoration of the faithful. 
Benedict XIY., influenced by the testimony of St. 
Paulinus of Nola, in a letter written to Severus, 
(the 31st in the collection of the Saint's letters,) 
thinks that this ceremony originated in the rite of 
the Church of Jerusalem of exposing the true 
Cross to adoration on Good Friday. Those of 
the Western Churches which were not so happy 
as to have a portion of the sacred relic performed 
the ceremony with a common crucifix. 

As long as the punishment of the cross con- 
tinued frequent amongst the Pagans, the early 
Christians were careful not to show in public the 
image of the God-Man attached to what was still 
considered an infamous instrument of death ; but 
they adorned the cross itself with precious stones 
in order that the sign of malediction might gradu- 
ally become in the eyes of the new converts a bign 
of glory and of triumph. What better use could 
be made of earth's jewels than in beautifying the 



THE CROSS AND THE CRUCIFIX. 85 

sacred emblem of that Cross which was once gem- 
med with Precious Blood ! Certain busy-bodies 
complaiaed to St. Francis of Sales that a noble 
lady, who had placed herself under his spiritual 
direction, was guilty of great vanity in adorning 
with diamonds a golden cross that she wore* 
" What you call vanity," said the mild and prudent 
saint, ^"edifies me much. Would that all the 
crosses in the world were adorned with diamonds and 
other precious stones !" 

The crosses of the first ages had sometimes on 
their top the figure of a dove, the symbol of the 
Holy Ghost. A copious stream of water flowed 
from its beak, typifying the abundant grace dif- 
fused in our hearts by the Spirit of Love. On the 
right of the cross was the Blessed Virgin, on the 
left St. John the Evangelist, and at its foot was 
a lamb from the breast and feet of which flowed 
blood, thus symbolizing the True Lamb crucified 
for our sins. The head of the lamb was surmounted 
by a cross, and the blood issuing from its breast 
was received in a chalice. This manner of repre- 
senting Jesus Christ was preserved until 680, when 
the third Council of Constantinople, held during the 
pontificate of Pope St. Agatho, ordered that for 



86 THE CROSS AND THE CRUCIFIX. 

the future our Lord should be represented attached 
to the cross under the figure of a man. 

Stags and lambs were sometimes depicted at the 
foot of the cross, eagerlj drinking of the water 
which bubbled up on all sides. The stags repre- 
sent the Gentiles who, by virtue of the cross, 
have been delivered from the darkness of idolatrj 
and purified from their sins; the lambs are the 
faithful who come to draw from the sacred sign of 
salvation the graces which they need to preserve 
their purity and innocence. Nor was it rare to 
paint on the cross twelve doves, emblems of the 
twelve Apostles whom their Divine Master bid be 
wise as serpents and simple as doves (St. Matt, x. 
16.) There w^ere also crosses from the extremities 
of which crowns were suspended ; hence they were 
called crowned crosses. These wreaths signify that 
to be crowned in heaven we must bear the cross on 
earth. The crown which was on the summit of the 
cross was upheld by a hand, symbol of the glorious 
victory which the Hand of the Risen Jesus gained, 
with the banner of the cross, by snatching the crown 
of empire from the pallid brow of Death. It was 
also an allusion to what was practiced amongst the 
Romans ; another's hand held suspended over the 
head of the conquering general, as he marched 



THE CROSS AND THE CRUCIFIX. 87 

through Rome in stately triumph, the wreath of 
victory. 

On most of the ancient crosses, when our Saviour 
is represented under a human shape, the figure is 
not in relief, but painted on the cross itself Some- 
times He is depicted not in an attitude of suffering 
and death but of triumph. Instances are not 
wanting in the Western Church of crucifixes which 
represent our Lord hanging to the cross entirely 
clothed. 

Our holy ancestors in the faith had great respect 
and love for the image of Jesus Crucified, and in 
this they have been imitated by the peasantry of 
Catholic Europe. On the roadside and in the forest, 
in the valley and on the mountain, stands the cross 
of Christ, preaching its silent but eloquent sermon 
on the Passion, bringing tears from the eyes and 
prayers from the heart of the Christian traveller. 
The Yendeans, children of Catholic France's most 
Catholic province, evinced in their heroic struggle 
against the God-despising French republic of the 
last century, a most touching devotion to the sym- 
bol of man's redemption. When rushing like lions 
to the charge, if they espied on the road a cross or 
an image of Mary, the ranks simultaneously halted, 
as if checked by an invisible power. The peasant 



88 THE CROSS AND THE CRUCIFIX. 

warriors fell on their knees and begged of Jesus 
crucified to bless their arms. Nor was their prayer 
in vain : they arose with a fire in their hearts that 
no danger could quench, with a strength in their 
arms that no enemy could resist. " Let them 
pray," said their gallant leader Lescu re, " they will 
fight all the better." 

The cross crowns the Catholic steeple, as a sign 
that Christ by His death on the cross, has joined 
heaven and earth, the Church Militant and the 
Church Triumphant. The crucifix must, by posi- 
tive law of the Church, be on or over the altar 
during the celebration of the Holy Mass, to show 
us that that Sacred Rite is the unbloody renewal of 
Calvary's bloody Sacrifice. The cross or the cru- 
cifix was, in Catholic States, the brightest gem in 
the monarch's crown, and it was stamped on the 
coin of the currency. 

We ought to make this holy sign ubiquitous. 
It should be in our houses, at our bedsides, around 
our necks. If we cannot reach the height of 
Christian perfection of bearing about Christ's Pas- 
sion m our bodies by practising great austerities, 
let us, at least, bear it on our bodies by having a 
crucifix about our persons. Let us put our Lord 



THE CROSS AND THE CRUCIFIX. 89 

^' as a seal on our hearts," that He may grant us 
the precious grace of having those hearts like His* 
Yarious indulgences have been granted by the 
Popes for good works performed in presence of the 
cross or crucifix, or when a person has one about 
him. These indulgences may be gained by being 
in a state of grace and renewing from time to time 
one's intention of gaining them. Bouvier in his 
Treatise on Indulgences, says that crosses of paper 
card, wood, iron, lead or glass cannot be indulgenced, 
but only those of gold, silver, brass or other metal. 
" According to Benedict XIV. and the Elenchus of 
Pius VII., it is not required that the whole cross 
be of gold, silver, brass, etc., but it suffices that the 
image of our Saviour be of some of these metals. 
An answer from Home decides that indulgences 
may be attached to ivory images. Another answer 
of April 11, 1840, decides that the indulgence is 
attached only to the image of our Saviour ; so that 
the figure may be transferred only from one cross 
to another without prejudice to the indulgence." 
Only he for whom a cross, medal or rosary was 
blessed, or to whom it was given, can gain the in- 
dulgence. 

The most common way of showing reverence to 
the cross is by making its sign on our persons, or 

8 



f 



90 THE CROSS AND THE CRUCIFIX. 

blessing ourselves. This holy rite is an epitome of 
the whole Christian religion, because it is a declar- 
ation of our belief in the three great mysteries of 
faith, the Trinity, the Incarnation and Redemption. 
The mention of three Divine Persons, in the for- 
mula of words which we use, is declaratory of the 
Trinity, whilst the figure of the cross sets forth our 
faith in Chiist, the Man-God, dying for us. 

There are two ways among Latin Catholics of 
making the sign of the cross. The first consists in 
touching the forehead with all the fingers of the 
right hand, then drawing the hand in a straight 
light to the breast, thence to the left, and from it 
to the right shoulder, pronouncing the words whilst 
we are performing this ceremony. Do not laugh, 
dear reader ; we know how to make the Jrign of 
the cross, but do we always put that Jiow into prac- 
tice ? We often make a flourish in the air with 
our fingers, but do we truly and reverently make 
on our bodies the representation of Christ's cross ? 

By drawing the hand from the forehead to the 
heart we symbolize the Second Person of the Blessed 
Trinity descending from heaven and becoming Man 
in the breast of the Blessed Virgin Mary. The 
passage of the hand from the left to the right 
shoulder shows forth how Christ has brought us 



The cross and the crucifix. 91 

from darkness to light, how He has merited for us 
a place on His right hand, on the judgment day, 
iostead of leaving as on His left, where by our 
sins we deserved to be. Let us co-operate with 
His grace, and that blessed right hand station will 
be ours ; there all our crosses will end. 

The other way of making the holy sign, in use 
among us, and which the Church prescribes for her 
minister when reading the first and last Gospel at 
Mass, is to make, with the thumb of the right hand, 
a cross on the forehead, lips and breast. Thereby 
we profess to believe the truths of the Gospel, to 
be ready to confess them with our lips, and to love 
them in our hearts. 

The Greek Christians bless themselves with the 
thumb and first two fingers of the right hand, and 
their cross terminates on the left shoulder. This 
manner was in use down to a very late period, even 
in the Latin Church. Pope Innocent IIL, in 1191, 
says : " The sign of the cross is to be made with 
three fingers, so that it may descend from top to 
bottom and then pass over from right to left. . . . 
Some persons however draw the sign of the cross 
from left to right " (De Mysteriis Missse, lib. IL 
c. xlv.) 

The Jacobites, heretics who admit only one 



92 THE CROSS AND THE CRUCIFIX. 

nature in Jesus Christ, make the sign of the cross 
with but one finger. The Nestorians, who hold 
that there are two persons in our Lord, whereas 
Catholic faith teaches that there is but one, use 
two fingers in signing themselves with the cross, 
and draw them from the right to the left shoulder 
to signify the victory of good over evl.i 

The custom of making the sign of cross is most 
ancient. Tertullian, who lived towards the end of 
second century, writes thus in his book Be Coroiia 
Militis. " At every step and movement, when- 
ever we come in or go out, when we dress and put 
on our shoes, at bath, at table, when lights are 
brought in, on lying or sitting down — whatever 
employment engages our attention, we make the 
sign of the cross upon our foreheads." 

The first christians used this holy sign to terrify 
the devils, and to shield themselves from all dan- 
gers of soul and body. It is related of the impious 
Emperor Julian, the Apostate, that upon a certain 
occasion when he went down into a cavern, in com- 
pany with a f^imous magician, to go through the 
impure rites of pagan worship, he was dreadfully 
terrified by unholy voices and apparitions. Apos- 
tate though he was, he made the sign of the cross, 
and the demon army fled. But when he and his 



THE CROSS AND THE CRUCIFIX. 93 

companion resumed their unlawful incantations, the 
devils came again, and again the sign of the cross 
drove them back to hell. 

If ever there was a Saint against whom the 
Devil raged in all his fury, it was St. Anthony the 
Hermit, Phantoms the most hideous and unholy 
beset the servant of God, but never did the sign of 
the holy cross fail him in his need ; it was to him 
a heavenly buckle warding off the fiery darts of the 
most wicked one. 

With the sign of the cross St. Benedict broke a 
cup that was presented to him full of a poisoned 
liquid, and St. Hilarion drove back into its native 
boundaries a raging sea which an earthquake had 
precipitated on the land. Under the persecution 
of Diocletian, St. Tiburtius was brought before the 
imperial prefect, Fabian. The pagan judge ordered 
him to offer incense to the gods of Rome or walk 
on burning coals. The Saint made the holy sign 
on his forehead and then, in bare feet, passed un- 
scathed over the glowing embers. 

See what the cross did when used in a spirit of 
faith and love ! We make its sign often enough, 
but not with reverence enough, not with faith 
enough. How many temptations would disappear, 
how many a sorrow of soul and body would be 



94 THE CROSS AND THE CRUCIFIX. 

soothed, if the heart went travelling for an instant 
to heaven or to Calvary before the hand made the 
sign of Christ's cross ! You that have sick rela- 
tive or friends, remember the power of the cross ; 
keep it before the eyes of those suffering ones, offer 
it to the loving impress of their lips, and like the 
good Samaritan you will thus be pouring into their 
grieving spirits a balm whose sweetly-soothing 
power only the sick and the sorrowing can fully feel. 
There is one devotion to the cross most appro- 
priate for the holy time of Lent — that of the Way 
of the Cross, In it we accompany our sorrowing 
Jesus through all the stages of His Holy Passion, 
and the Church grants us as many indulgences for 
this devotion as we would gain by going on a pil- 
grimage to Palestine. 



VL 

THE RELICS OF THE PASSION. 

Veith has a beautiful thought in the beginning 
of his little book on the Instruments of Christ's 
Passion : as, in the lovely regions of the East, 
friends send to one another, as pledges of affection, 
nosegays in which each flower has its appropriate 
meaning, so does our Jesus reach out to us from 
the Holy Land a bouquet, made of the instruments 
of His Passion, as a token of His everlasting Love. 

The hand of time, acting in obedience to our 
Lord's will, has scattered the various flowers of the 
nosegay in different gardens of the Church. Some 
bloom round the foot of Peter's Chair, some on the 
banks of the Moselle, some on the sunny Seine. 
Let us unite them again in spirit and put them in 



96 THE RELICS OF THE PASSION. 

our hearts that their sweet fragrance may attract 
the Heavenly Gardener into our souls. 



The Crown of Thorns, 

The cruel soldiers, after they had scourged our 
Lord, placed on His Sacred Head a crown of thorns. 
The Evangelists do not tell us whether Jesus bore 
His diadem of shame and torture to Calvary, and 
whether it was on His Head when He hung on the 
Cross ; but the pious belief of the faithful and the 
traditions of Christian art agree on both these 
points. The disciples who took down the Sacred 
Body from the Cross took possession of the croAvn 
of thorns. The Christians of the first century kept 
it with great reverence, and handed it down to the 
second generation. St. Paulinus of Nola tells us, 
in 409, that the crown of thorns was then in the 
possession of the faithful. Like most of the relics 
of the Passion, it became the property of the im- 
perial treasury of Constantinople. There it re- 
mained until the thirteenth century, when the Latin 
emperors, being in want of money, pawned it and 
other relics to the Venetians. Baldwin II. relin- 



THE RELICS OF THE PASSION. 97 

quished his claim to these holy articles in favor of 
St. Louis, King of France. The holy monarch 
immediately redeemed them, and conveyed them 
with all honor to the chapel of his royal palace in 
Paris. The crown of thorns was taken from its re- 
liquary in 1793, during the first French Revolu- 
tion, and broken into three pieces, which were taken, 
with the other relics of the Sacred Chapel, to the 
Commission of Arts, and thence to the National 
Library. In 1804, Cardinal de Bellay, Archbishop 
of Paris, begged that the articles should be restored 
to the cathedral, and his petition was granted. 
The crown was identified by those who had seen 
and examined it before its seizure by the govern- 
ment. There are now no thorns on it, these hav- 
ing been given away as relics to different churches. 
The Church celebrates the Festival of the Crown 
of Thorns on the Friday after Ash- Wednesday. 
The office is full of the most beautiful and touching 
sentiments which could have sprung from no other 
heart than that of Christ's Mystic Spouse. Thus 
she addresses the virgins of Jerusalem, in the hymn 
of Vespers : 

Go ye forth, 1 Sion's daughters I 
See the thorny coronet 

9 



98 THE RELICS OF THE PASSION. 

On the temples of your Saviour 
By a cruel mother set.* 

Seek in vain for rays of glory 

Streaming from His forehead now : 

Thorns, in needles long and piercing, 
Bristle round his blood-stained brovr. 

Cruel earth ! of thorns and brambles 

Such a woeful crop to bear — 
Cruel hand ! to pluck and wreath them 

In the locks of Jesus' hair. 

See, the thorn-bush blooms in roses ! 

Fed by blood-drops of the Lamb ; 
And the thorn is victory's emblem 

Like the laurel and the palm. 

Than the thorns that wreathed his temples 

Far more cruel is the smart 
Unto Jesus of the brambles 

That are growing in man's heart. 

* Go forth ^ ye daughters of Sion ; and see King SoJo- 
mon in the diadem, luherewith his mother croicned him in 
day of his espousals (Cant, iii., 11.) The text, in its literal 
meaning, refers to King Solomon crowned by his mother 
Bethsabee with flowers, on the day of his marriage. Spir- 
itual writers apply it mystically to our Lord, crowned with 
thorns, by his cruel mother, the Synagogue. 



THE RELICS OF THE PASSION. 99 

Pluck them, Saviour, from our bosoms, 
Sin did plant them — they have grown , 

And in place of them, Sweet Jesus, 
Plant the memory of Thine own. 

The hymn of Lauds enumerates the types of our 
Saviour's crown contained in the Old Testament : 

In the Law are types and figures 

Of the painful crown of Christ ; 
First, the thorn -entangled victim 

By the Patriarch sacrificed. 

On the fiery bush of Horeb 

Ponder, Christians ; from it learn 

How amid Christ's thorny circlet 
Flames of pure love ruddy burn. 

And around the Ark, as emblem, 

Was a crown of purest gold, 
And around the incense-altar 

Where the clouds of fragrance rolled. 



The Holy Shroud, 

We learn from the Gospel according to St. John 
that several linen cloths were wrapped around the 



100 THE RELICS OF THE PASSION. 

Body of our Lord when It was laid in the tomb. 
Theij took therefore the Body of Jesus and hound 
It in linen cloths with the s_pices, as it is the cus- 
tom loith the Jews to bury. . . . Then cometh 
Simon Peter, following him, and went into the 
sepulchre and saw the linen cloths lying (St. John, 
xix, 40. . . . XX, 6.) Hence, there is no 
difficulty in reconciling the traditions of different 
churches, as of Turin, Besancon, etc., that they are 
in possession of the true shroud of our Lord ; each 
may have one of the several which touched His 
Sacred Corpse. That of Turin is the most cele- 
brated ; it has the marks of the wounds and of the 
Blood. Nicodemus, who assisted Joseph of Arim- 
athea in burying our Lord, was the first possessor 
of this holy shroud. When he was dying he be- 
queathed it to Gamaliel, the great Doctor of the 
Pharisees and teacher of St. Paul. Gamaliel 
transmitted it to St. James the Less, the first 
Bishop of Jerusalem, and he to his successor, St. 
Simeon. Thus it passed from hand to hand 
among the Christians of Jerusalem, until the city 
was captured, in 1187, by Saladin, when Guy 
of Lusignan, the dethroned King of Jerusalem, 
going to Cyprus, which had been ceded to him by 
Richard of England, took the relic with him. In 



THE RELICS OF THE PASSION. 101 

1450, the Princess Margaret, the widow of the last 
of the Lusignans, fearing that she might fall into 
the hands of the Turks, resolved to go to France. 
She took the holy shroud with her, and when she 
passed through Chambery, to visit her relative, the 
Duchess of Savoy, she made her a persent of it. 
From Chambery, the holy shroud was carried to 
Annecy, and thence to Turin, the capital of Sar- 
dinia, where it is now. It was in presence of this 
precious memorial of the Passion, that the mother 
of St. Francis of Sales, made an offering of her son, 
yet unborn, to Jesus Christ. 

The Lance* 

Among the relics which St. Louis redeemed from 
the Venetians was the point of the lance which 
pierced our Saviour's side, The handle remained 
at Constantinople until the end of the fifteenth 
century, when it was sent by the Sultan Bajazet as 
a present to Pope Innocent VIII. It is now pre- 
served with great veneration in the Vatican Basi- 
lica. 

It is the more common opinion of ecclesiastical 
antiquarians that it was our Lord's right side that 
was pierced by the lance. Hence those paintings 



102 THE RELICS OF THE PASSION. 

which represent the left side as wounded are not 
in accordance with the traditions of Christian art. 

The soldier who pierced Jesus is venerated in the 
Western or Latin Church under the name of St. 
Longinus. After the Crucifixion he became a 
Christian, and preached the faith in Cappodocia, a 
province of Asia, where he was crowned with mar- 
tyrdom. There is a legend that, having casually 
applied to his eyes his hands stained with the 
Blood which trickled down from the sacred wound, 
he was immediately freed from a weakness of sight, 
with which he was affected. 



The Nails. 

It is certain that our Lord was fastened to the 
Cross with nails and not with ropes : thus speaks 
the Apostle St. Thomas, whose doubt serves to con- 
firm our faith : Excei^t I sliall see in His hands 
the ^rint of the nails, and put my finger into the 
place of the nails, and put my hand into His 
side, I will not believe (St. John, xx. 25.) The 
nails are clearly alluded to in the prophecy of our 
Saviour's Passion, contained in the 21st Psalm : 
They Imve dug my hands and feet. 



THE RELICS OF THE PASSION. 103 

The Sacred Body was pierced with four nails, 
each foot having its separate nail. No bone of 
our Saviour was broken, and this could scarcely 
have happened, says Benedict XIV., had one nail 
been made to pass through both feet. 

^^ According to the opinion more generally 
adopted," says Abbe Guillois, in his Catechism, 
^' the arms of our Lord when attached to the cross 
were, nearly horizontal, to show that His love was 
universal, embracing the whole human race. The 
Jansenists, who hold that Jesus Christ did not die 
for all men, represent the arms in a position more 
or less vertical ; crucifixes of this kind have been 
called Jansenistic crucifixes." 

The nails were found by St. Helena^at the same 
time that she discovered the Cross. The pious 
empress attached one to the helmet of Constantine, 
her son, and another to the bridle of his horse. It 
is commonly said that she threw a third into the 
Adriatic Sea in order to appease the tempests 
which so frequently lashed it into fury. But it is 
not probable that she would so readily cast away 
so precious a relic ; may she not have simply dipped 
it into the waves ? 

A part of one of the nails is in the church of the 
Holy Cross at Rome. The cathedrals of Paris, 



104 THE RELICS OF THE PASSION. 

Treves, and Toul are in possession of others. 
Filings from the true nails and nails which have 
touched them are kept in different churches as 
relics. 

The celebrated Iron Crown of Italy contains a 
portion of one of the sacred nails 



The Title of the Cross, 

And Pilate wrote a title also and put it upon 
the cross. And the writing was, " Jesus of Na- 
zareth, the King of the Jews " .... and 
it was written in UehreWy in Greek, and in Latin 
(St. John xix 19, 20.) Hebrew, or, as it was then 
called, Syro-Chaldaic, was the language of the 
great multitude of the Jews, yet those who lived 
dispersed through the provinces of the former 
Grseco-Macedonian empire were more conversant 
with Greek, and as there were many of them in 
Jerusalem at the time of the Crucifixion, because 
of the Pasch, the title was written in Greek that 
they might read it. Latin was the official language 
of the government. 

St. Ambrose and Rufinus relate that St. Helena 
found the title, but in a different place from that 



THE RELICS OF THE PASSION. 105 

in which she found the cross. She presented it to 
the Basilica of the Holy Cross in Rome. Peter 
Gonsalvo, Cardinal de Mendoza, tells us that when 
this church was undergoing repairs in 1482, under 
Pope Innocent VIII., a part of the title of the 
cross, inscribed with Hebrew, Greek and Latin 
characters was found in the wall. The last two 
letters of the word Judmorum were wanting. 
When the sacred relic was examined again in 1564, 
1648, and 1828, the ravages of time on the letters 
were still more visible No more remains of the 
Hebrew inscription than the terminations of some 
letters which can no longer be deciphered. Of 
the Greek inscription the word Isazarenous re- 
mains. The Latin is a little more complete, con- 
taining beside the adjective Nazarenus the t^o first 
letters of the word Bex. These remains show us 
that the Greek and Latin letters were written, 
contrary to the usual custom, from right to left. 
This was done in order make them correspond with 
the first inscription, which was in Hebrew : this 
language is always written from right to left. 



106 THE RELICS OF THE PASSION. 



The Seamless Hobe^ 

The seamless robe which our Lord wore was, 
according to many writers, the work of the Blessed 
Virgin. She wove it with her own hands, and 
clothed her Son with it while He was still a child. 
The tunic grew with the growth of Jesus Christ, 
and never wore out ; a miracle the like of which 
God had already wrought in favor of the Jews in 
their passage through the desert of Arabia to the 
Promised Land. During the forty years of their 
journey their garments wore not out (Deuteronomy 
xxix, 5.) The Evangelist St. John (xix, 23, 24) 
thus relates what happened to the seamless robe on 
Calvary : The soldwrs, when they had crucified 
Himy took His garments {cmd they made four 
parts, to every soldier a jpa7%) and also His coat. 
JVow the coat was without seam, woven fronn the 
top throughout. Then said they one to another: 
Let us not cut it, but let us cast lots for it whose 



* This account of the Seamless Robe is translated from 
the excellent Catechisme de M. V Ahhe Guillois, to which 
work and the Treatise of Benedict XIV. JDe Festis D. N. 
J. C. I am indebted for most of the particulars concerning 
the Relics ef the Passion. 



THE RELICS OF THE PASSION. 107 

it shall 5^. * . . And the soldiers indeed did 
tliese things. The holy tunic was redeemed by the 
Christians, and came into possession of St. Helena, 
when she went to the Holy Land. On her return 
to Europe she gave it to Agricius, Bishop of Treves, 
a city on the banks of the Moselle. 

The church of Argenteuil, near Paris, possesses 
another garment of our Lord, the authenticity of 
which has been established by many signal favors 
of heaven. The Lady Superior of Les Dames de 
St Louis, at Juilly, diocese of Meaux, writing to 
the curate of Argenteuil, under date of 2d of Jan., 
1847, testifies that she had been completely cured 
of a disease in the knee by a no vena in honor of the 
holy robe of Argenteuil. 

The Bishop of Treves, whose cathedral possesses 
the seamless robe, obtained, in 1844, the institu- 
tion of an office in honor of this relic. A prodigious 
multitude of pilgrims — according to some accounts, 
two millions in number — flocked during that year 
to Treves, to reverence this memorial of our Lord 
and the Blessed Virgin. 



VIL 

THE GOLBEN EOSE.* 

The lights of hope and joy, the shadows of 
despondency and sorrow are ever flitting over- the 
surface of human life, teaching the heart the solemn 
lesson of detachment from earth and giving it 
glimpses of heaven, that city of perpetual brightness 
whose " light is the Lamb," the uncreated splendor 
of the Father. We need this succession of light 
and shade ; continual prosperity would make us love 
the world, and we would forget that the days of 
our pilgrimage are few and evil, whilst lasting ad- 
versity would deaden the elasticity of the heart and 
drive it to despair. The Church knows the require- 

* For several of the particulars of this article we are in- 
debted to a manuscript kindly placed at our disposal by a 
lleverend friend. 



THE GOLDEN ROSE. 109 

ments of our nature in this respect and provides 
for them. The penitential seasons of Advent and 
Lent are succeeded by the joys of Christmas and 
the glories of Easter. The sorrows of Holy Week 
are interrupted by the (xloria of Holy Thursday, 
and then again the last notes of the Angelic Hymn 
die away in the wail of the Miserere of Tenebrse 
and the Imp'operia of Good Friday. Advent has 
its Gaudete Sunday, when the Church bids her 
children rejoice in the Lord always, because He is 
near, because He is soon to be manifested to the 
world as the Babe of Bethlehem ; so too on the 
fourth Sunday of Lent a cry of joy resounds through 
the office. Rejoice 0! Jerusalem! Rejoice thou 
barren that hearest not The time for the recon- 
ciliation of the penitents is approaching; the children 
that were dead in sio will come to life and be restored 
to the arms of their mother, and in anticipation her 
heart beats high with gladness. Then her eye turns 
to Palestine, ranges the dark sky that overhangs 
the scenes of the Passion and rests on the horizon 
just reddening with the rst faint streaks of light 
from the Easter Sun. Sorrow and penance yield 
for a moment to the exultation of triumphant love 
and from her lips breaks forth an anthem of glad- 
ness — Lodare^ Loetare^ Rejoice^ Rejoice* 



110 THE GOLDEN ROSE. 

This fourth Sunday of Lent is set apart in Rome 
for the blessing of the Golden Rose. Gold of the 
purest quality is fashioned into a rose by the hands 
of a skilful artist. The Sovereign Pontiff blesses 
it with appropriate prayer and unctions and then 
sends it to some princes or princess, church or city, 
as a pledge of his paternal affection. 

Antiquarians do not agree on the origin of this 
ceremony, but it seems that, as far back as the 
twelfth and eleventh century, the Popes used to 
carry a golden rose when walking in procession on 
Lsetare Sunday. Alexander III. sent one, towards 
the end of the twelfth century, to Louis VII. of 
France in acknowledgment of the services which 
that King had rendered the Church. The solemn 
blessing of the Rose appears to be of later date. It 
was in use at the beginning of the sixteenth cen- 
tury, because Pope Julius II. expressly alludes to 
it, in 1510, when he sent the Golden Rose to Henry 
VIII. of England. Little did the Pontiff suspect 
that ere many years the pestilential blasts of schism 
and heresy would kill the roses of Catholic faith 
and devotion in that kingdom. If the report of 
the public journals be true, his present Holiness, 
Pius IX., has sent three Roses to European prin- 
cesses ; one to Maria Teresa, Queen of Naples, to 



THE GOLDEN ROSE. Ill 

thank her for the kindness and affection with which 
she and her royal consort Ferdinand received him 
at Gaeta when he fled from Rome in 1848 ; one 
to the Empress Eugenie, wife of Napoleon III., 
and one to Elizaheth, Empress of Austria. 

No more fitting present could be made to prince 
or princess. Gold is the emblem of sovereignty, 
and for this reason the Magi offered it to- our Infant 
Lord to own His supreme dominion over heaven 
and earth. The Rose, on the one hand, is the 
queen of flowers. The papal gift reminds its royal 
recipient that the lustre of his virtue ought to be 
like the glitter of gold among metals and the bril- 
liancy of the rose among flowers. Balsam, mixed 
with musk, is poured over the Golden Rose to teach 
the sovereign that his lofty station requires him to 
spread abroad the sweet odor of royal virtue, and 
that, like balm, he ought to heal up the wounds of 
the State, and, as it does for material bodies, pre- 
serve the political body from corruption. The 
Golden Rose is anointed by the hand of Christ's 
Vicar that the Catholic prince may learn that com- 
munion with Rome and loving obedience to St. 
Peter's successor are necessary conditions for the 
Christian exercise of his high prerogative. Let 
him break the holy tie that binds him to Peter's 



112 THE GOLDEN ROSE. 

chair and that moment he falls, like a rose from its 
stem, to wither and to die. He sets the example of 
disobedience, and he will soon find it followed at 
home. The French revolution was prepared by 
Louis XIV., when, in his political Jansenism, he 
would make the French Church independent of 
Rome. Henry VIII. of England scoffed at Papal 
authority — his race became extinct, the crown was 
transferred to the brow of the Stuarts, and the first 
Charles of that unfortunate race learned on the 
scaffold how the sins of kings are visited on their 
successors. 

Whilst the symbolical properties of this holy 
sacramental are, in an especial manner, applicable 
to princes, they contain lessons for all Christians. 
The prayer with which it is blessed is, like all the 
prayers of the Church, full of meaning and beauty. 
It represents the Rose as an emblem of Jesus 
Christ and of that spiritual joy which should fill 
the heart on Lsetare Sunday. " God ! by whose 
Word and power all things have been created, by 
whose will all things are directed. Thou who art the 
joy and gladness of all the faithful, we humbly be- 
seech Thy Majesty that Thou wouldst vouchsafe in 
Thy fatherly love to bless and sanctify this Rose, 
most delightful in odor and appearance, which we 



THE GOLDEN ROSE. 113 

this day carry in sign of spiritual joy 

May Thy Church, as the fruit of good works, give 
forth the perfume of His ointments who is the 
Flower sprung from the Root of Jesse, the Flower 
of the field and the Lily of the valley." 

The Gospel of Sunday relates how our Lord fed 
five thousand persons with five loaves and two 
fishes. This miracle foreshadow^ed the Blessed 
Eucharist in which Jesus Christ gives Himself as 
the food of the soul. The Golden Rose is allied 
then to the Blessed Sacrament. Our Lord, in that 
pledge of His love, is truly a rose waftiog the per- 
fume of heaven over the deserts of the world, and 
refreshing in a more special manner those who 
approach Him closer by visiting Him in the churches 

in which He dwells. 

10 



VIII. 
THE HOLY OILS. 

It was customary among the Jews for guests 
invited to a banquet to anoint themselves with 
oil. From this we may understand why the Church 
consecrates her oils in the last week of Lent. Two 
spiritual banquets are preparing. Many that were 
without the pale of truth are to be brought into it 
by baptism, during the Easter time, and made to 
sit down with the children of the household at the 
banquet of Christ's Holy Faith. The Holy Ghost, 
too, is getting ready a feast of sevenfold gifts and 
twelve precious fruits of holiness.* For the happy 

* The Gifts of the Holy Ghost are : "Wisdom, Understand- 
ing, Counsel, Fortitude, Knowledge, Piety, and the Fear of 
the Lord. His Fruits are: Charity, Joy, Peace, Patience, 
Benignity, Goodness, Longanimity, Mildness, Faith, Mo- 
desty, Contiaency, and Chastity. 



THE HOLY OILS. 115 

guestSj called to these two divine banquets, Mother 
Church prepares the fragrant oils of gladness where- 
with they may be anointed. 

The use of oil in consecrating persons and things 
to God is sanctioned by His own divine Word. 
The 30th chapter of Exodus relates in detail the 
manner of preparing the holy oil of unction with 
which the priests of the Lord, the ark of the cove- 
nant, the tabernacle, and all the sacred vessels 
were to be anointed. And thus shalt thou say to 
the children of Israel : the oil of miction shall be 
holy unto Me throughout your generations. 

The Catholic Church has derived the sacred rite 
of anointing from Apostolic practice and teaching : 
And they (the twelve Apostles) cast out many 
devils and anointed with oil many that were sick 
and healed them (St Mark, vi., 13.) Is any man 
sick among you ? Let him bring in the priests of 
the Church, and let them joray over him anointing 
him with oil in the name of the Lord (St. James, 
v., 14.) 

The civil and religious unctions of the Jews were 
shadows and types of the sacramentals unctions of 
the Church of Christ, not the originals from which 
the latter are copied. Yet even the festal unction 
alluded to above was approved by our Lord: 



116 THE HOLY OILS. 

W/ieu thou fastest anoint thy head and wash thy 
face, that thou apjpear not to men to fast (St. 
Matt, vL, 17, 18.) 

The Oils used by the Church in the administra- 
tion of the Sacraments and in other sacred rites are 
three in number : Chrism, the Oil of Catechumens, 
and the Oil of the Sick. 

Chrism is a word of Greek origin, meaning both 
a substance used for anointing and the action of 
anointing. The epithet Christ, applied to our 
Lord, is of the same derivation ; it signifies the 
Anointed One, He was so called because He was 
Priest, King and Prophet, and therefore worthy 
of a triple unction, for at all times and amongst most 
nations those destined to any of these high offices 
have been consecrated with oil. God I Thy God 
hath anointed Thee with the Oil of gladness above 
Thy fellows (Ps. xiiy., 8.) 

Chrism is composed of olive oil mixed with bal- 
sam. It is the remote matter of the Sacrament of 
Confirmation, and is also used in one of the cere- 
monies following the administration of Baptism. 
The Oil of Catechumens is so called because with 
it the catechumens'* were anointed before they re- 

* Catechumens was a name given, in the early Church, 
to those who were preparing for Baptism by receiving '< cate- 
chetical " or oral instructions in the truths of faith. 



THE HOLY OILS. 117 

ceived solemn Baptism. It is still used in one of 
the preparatory rites of that Sacrament. With 
this oil the hands of the priest are anointed during 
the ceremony of his ordination. The Oil of the 
Sick is, like the preceding, the product of the 
olive, and constitutes the remote matter of the 
Sacrament of Extreme Unction. 

The reverence which the Church shows to the 
Holy Oils is second only to that paid to the Blessed 
Eucharist. In all her ritual there are few cere- 
monies more solemn than that whereby they are 
sanctified. She chooses for it one of the greatest 
days in her calendar, that on which she commemo- 
rates the institution of the Most Holy Sacrament, 
Thursday of Holy Week; and she entrusts its per- 
formance to Bishops, the Princes of her hierarchy. 
We find in the works of the Fathers the most 
magnificent eulogies of the sacredness and efi&cacy 
of the Oils. St. Cyprian informs us, in one of his 
letters, that the Chrism was consecrated on the 
same altar on which the Eucharistic Sacrifice was 
offered. St. Cyril of Jerusalem compares it to 
the Blessed Eucharist. "Think not," says this 
holy Father, "that this perfume is something 
common. For as, after the invocation of the Holy 
Ghost, the Eucharistic Bread is no longer common 



118 THE HOLY OILS. 

bread, but the Body of Jesus Christ, so the holy 
perfume is no longer a profane thing, but a gift of 
Jesus Christ and of the Holy Ghost." 

Among the Christian communities of the East the 
Chrism was prepared with the greatest care and 
consecrated with the utmost pomp. The Greek 
Euchology, or ceremonial book, reckons no less 
than forty different perfumes which enter into its 
composition. In fact, some of the Patriarchs 
thought that so solemn and imposing a rite as the 
sanctification of the Chrism ought to be performed 
only by themselves, not by the Bishops under their 
jurisdiction. Hence for a time the Patriarch of 
Alexandria used to consecrate the Chrism for all 
the dioceses of Egypt. One of the Patriarchs of 
Constantinople, who held that see about the year 
1200, refused permission to the Primate of Bul- 
garia and Wallachia to bless the Chrism. When 
the Bulgarians re-entered the communion of the 
Mother Church of Borne, Pope Innocent III. de- 
clared that, according to the rubrics of the Boman 
Bitual,* not only the Primate, but also the suffragan 

* Rubric is from a Latin word meaning "red.^' The 
rules prescribing the manner of performing the sacred cere- 
monies of divine worship are so called because they are writtea 
in red characters. 



THE HOLY OILS. 119 

Bishops, had full authority to consecrate all the oils 
on Holj Thursday. 

The great reverence in which the Eastern 
schismatics hold the Sacred Oils may have its 
origin in a beautiful legend, but one which the 
Church has not sanctioned. When Mary Magda- 
len poured her alabaster box of perfumes over our 
Saviour's head and feet, the Apostles gathered to- 
gether many drops of the precious oil. They car- 
ried a portion with them on their missionary travels, 
and kept it in the churches which they founded. 
It was mixed with the first oil that was blessed by 
the prayers of the Church, and thus all subsequent 
oils have indirectly touched that which was sancti- 
fied by contact with the Sacred Body of our Lord. 

During the first four centuries no fixed day was 
set aside for the blessing of the oils, but, in the 
fifth century, it became customary to perform the 
ceremony on Holy Thursday. The Council of 
Meaux, in 845, added to custom the sanction of 
positive law. 

The weak-minded and uninstructed sometimes 
carried their false reverence for the Holy Oils to a 
sinful excess. Against the abuses which arose in 
consequence the Church ever protested, and she 
enacted the severest penalties against those of her 



120 THE HOLY OILS. 

ministers who should connive at them. There 
were some who thought that a criminal might en- 
tirely hide his misdeeds from the scrutiny of justice, 
if he could succeed in anointing himself with Sacred 
Chrism or drinking it. The sentence decreed 
against a priest who should give it to him for this 
impious purpose was deposition and the loss of his 
hand: manum amittat. And to prevent the evil- 
inclined from sacri-legiously stealing the Chrism, 
the priest was ordered to keep it under lock and 
key. 

The abuse of a sacred thing does not derogate 
from its claim to legitimate honor, and this the 
Church has always shown to the Oils. She desires 
that only those who have received ecclesiastical 
ordination should touch or carry the vessels in 
which they are contained, and that they should be 
kept with the greatest care and reverence. It is 
in accordance with the spirit of the Church, mani- 
fested by her councils and the writings of her most 
approved rubricians, to keep the Oil of the Sick in 
an enclosure or tabernacle in the wall on the gospel 
side of the sanctuary. In many places it would be 
impossible, or at least, inconvenient, to observe this 
direction, yet it shows the greatest reverence due 
to the Oils, 



THE H^LY OILS. 121 

The symbolical meanings of the Holy Oils are 
many and beautiful. Oil naturally tends to spread 
and diffuse itself, and thus it is emblematic of the 
manifold graces diffused through the heart by the 
Holy Spirit. It softens and makes supple that 
which is hard and stiff; so, too, the unction of 
Sacred Chrism renders our hearts tender and pliable 
to the inspirations of grace, destroying in them 
that obstinacy which resists the Holy Ghost. The 
athletse of ancient times used to anoint their bodies 
with oil, that they might combat the better in the 
games. The Church anoints her children in Bap- 
tism to prepare them for their life-long wrestling 
against the powers of darkness, against the spirits 
of wickedness in the high places, not for a corruptible 
wreath of laurel, but for a never-fading crown of 
glory. She anoints them at the moment of death 
to strengthen them against the laBt decisive charge 
of the army of hell. 

Oil burns with a pure bright ray: the holy 
unctions light the fires of divine love in the soul, 
and their pure flames shed round the child and 
the soldier of Christ a lustre of virtue which blinds 
and dazzles the scoffing infidel, but leads the earnest 
enquirer from the mazes of darkness into the king- 
dom of Christ's true light. 

11 



122 THE HOLY OILS. 

Balsam, one of the iagredients of the Chrism, has 
also its appropriate symbolism. It represents the 
spiritual fragrance and sweetness dwelling in a 
sanctified soul, and which irresistibly tend to diffu- 
sion. As well might the perfume of the flower re- 
main hidden in its chalice as the odor of virtue be 
confined to the heart which is blessed with it. 

Only the olive, of all trees, has the privilege of 
supplying oil for the sacred rites of religion. It 
was the silent witness of our Lord's agony in the 
garden of Gethsemani, and its roots were bedewed 
with His Precious Blood, It is an evergreen, and 
it lives for centuries, ! that the souls once 
signed with the unction of the Spirit in the 
Holy Sacraments might never wither and dry up, 
might never lose the life-imparting sap of Christ's 
grace ! Then like their Lord and Master would 
they be the green wood, not the dry, rotten branches 
fit only for eternal fire. 

The olive-branch is the symbol of peace and 
reconciliation. The dove bore it back to Noah, 
and it was a sign to the Patriarch that God was 
about to make a new covenant with man. The 
olive-branch which Christian painters sometimes 
put in the hand of the Archangel Gabriel announc- 



THE HOLY OILS. 123 

ing the Incarnation to the Blessed Virgin, tells of 
the advent of the Prince of Peace. Now Peace is 
one of the fruits of the Holy Ghost. When He 
sanctifies the seal by the Sacramental unctions, 
He fills it with ineffable peace. 



IX. 

BLESSED PALM. 

Our Lord entered Jerusalem in triumph, on the 
Sunday before He suffered, attended by a glad 
multitude shouting Hosanna to the Son of David 
and strewing His way with branches of palm 
and olive. It is this solemn entry of our Saviour 
into the Holy City that the Church commemorates 
on the Sunday of Holy Week. She blesses green 
branches of palm, cedar, or box-wood, and distri- 
butes them to the clergy and faithful. Then a 
white-robed procession of her ministers, bearing the 
blessed boughs and chanting a hymn of praise and 
triumph, winds slowly through the aisles of God's 
holy house. Thus does the wise Mother indelibly 
impress one of the greatest events of Christ's life 
upon the memory of her children. She knows that 



BLESSED PALM. 125 

they are not pure intelligences, like the angels, but 
spirits united to mortal bodies, spirits who hold 
communion with the outward world through the 
windows of the senses, and who represent to them- 
selves even invisible and intangible truths under 
material forms. Therefore her worship is dramatic 
and life-like. She speaks to the soul through the 
eye, and thus prepares the mind for grasping and 
remembering the various articles of her holy teach- 
ing. 

The Jewish multitude received our Lord on 
Palm-Sunday with the same manifestations of joy 
as were usual during the Feast of the Tabernacles. 
This solemnity was celebrated in the month of 
September, for the space of eight days, in memory 
of the time when the Jews dwelt in tents, or taber- 
nacles, on their journey through the wilderness to 
the Promised Land. During the continuance of 
the festival, the people walked daily in procession 
around the altar, carrying in their hands branches 
of palm, olive and willow, and singing Hosanna.* 

The Feast of the Tabernacles served another pur- 
pose besides that of keeping the Jews in mind of 

* Hosanna means " Save, 1 beseech you." In the East, 
Palm-Sunday is still called " Hosannna Sunday." 



126 BLESSED PALM. 

God's mercy to them in guiding them through the 
desert : it was one of the many means which kept 
alive in their breasts the hope of the Messiah who 
was to give them the mansions of eternal bliss in 
exchange for the tabernacles of their earthly pil- 
grimage. In their minds it was always connected 
with Him, and they gave expression to this con- 
viction in one of the ceremonies of the festival. 
They drew water from the fountain of Siloe, and, 
going in solemn procession to the altar of holo- 
causts, poured it upon it, singing the while, in a 
subdued voice, portions from the Sacred Scriptures, 
among others, according to some writers, a passage 
from the 12 th chapter of Isaias : You shall draw 
waters imth joy out of the Saviour^s fountains. 
From our Lord's own words, in the 7th chapter of 
the Gospel according to St. John, we may plainly 
infer that this rite was typical of Him : On the last 
great day of the festivity (of the tabernacles) Jesus 
stood and cried out^ saying ; If any man thirst let 
him come to Me and drink. He that helieveth in 
Me, as the Scripture saith, out of his belly shall 
flow rivers of living water. 

The Jews, then, by their hosannas and palm- 
branches, acknowledged Jesus to be the Son of 
David, the Messiah promised to their fathers, the 



BLESSED PALM. 127 

Saviour of Israel. Yet on the next Friday they 
crucified Him ! Their faith of Sunday had not 
taken root in the soil of charity, and before the end 
of the week it had withered and died ! May the 
like not happen to us ! 

An old Roman calendar, or catalogue of feasts 
and fasts, and the Sacramentary of Pope Gelasius 
prove that the rite of blessing palms on the Sunday 
before Easter is as old as the fifth century. The 
solemn procession can claim an antiquity of at least 
twelve hundred years, for it is mentioned by St. 
Isidore of Seville, who lived in the seventh century. 

All the solitaries of the desert and the cenobites* 
used to meet together on Palm Sunday to take 
part in the procession, and then they returned 
again to their cells to prepare in silence and 
prayer for the great festival of Easter. In many 
places the benediction and distribution of the 
palms took place outside the city at one of the 
wayside crosses ; thence the procession started 
towards the city gates, thus representing more 
vividly our Saviour's entry into Jerusalem from 
the country. Bouquets of flowers, attached to 
boughs of trees, were sometimes carried in the pro- 

* Religious living together in communities were called 
'* cenobites." 



128 BLESSED PALM. 

cession, and hence the name of the Under of 
Floivers given to Palm Sunday. It was called 
Easter because on that day the time within which 
the Easter Communion was to be made began.* 
In some churches the Book of the Gospels, as re- 
presenting Jesus Christ, was carried with the 
greatest pomp in the procession of Palm Sunday. 
It was elevated on a richly decorated altar, sur- 
rounded by palm branches and lights, the wreath- 
ing of incense and the waving of banners. Some- 
times the Blessed Sacrament Itself was carried as 
is now done in the procession of Corpus Christi. 

When the procession re-enters the church or the 
sanctuary the cross-bearer knocks with the foot of 
the cross at the door. This ceremony represents 
our Lord knocking at the golden gates of heaven 
on the day of His triumphal ascension, and bidding 
the wondering angels open for Him and the bright 
army of happy souls released from Limbo, the first 
fruits of His Passion, the first human shares of His 
glory. Lift ujp your gates, ye j^rinces ! and he 

* The Paschal time, properly so called, within which the 
faithful are bound to receive the Blessed Sacrament accord- 
ing to the law of the Church, extends only from Palm Sun- 
day to Low Sunday; in this country, however, by privilege, 
it extends from the first Sunday of Lent to Trinity Sunday. 



BLESSED PALM. 129 

ye lifted up, eternal gates! and the king of glory 
shall enter in. (Ps. xxxiii. 7.) 

Like all the other Sacramentals the palm-branch 
has its holy symbolism. The tree from which it is 
taken is one of the most useful of trees. The wide 
spreading leaves that crown its top afford a delight- 
ful shade from the scorching rays of the summer 
sun. So the Holy Ghost overshadows us with His 
grace and screens us from the darts of Satan, and 
the Eternal Father "overshadows us with His 
shoulders and under His wings we may trust," and 
may we not go whenever we please to the sanctuary 
and repose under the shadow of our Beloved in the 
Blessed Sacrament ? The palm supplies us with 
the date, a most delicious fruit, and from its pierced 
bark it pours a species of wine. Jesus in the most 
Holy Eucharist gives His Body for our food and 
His Blood for our wine. 

The Palm has been in all times and places the 
emblem of victory and its reward. The conqueror 
in the Olympic games, in the races of the circus, 
at the tribune or the bar received it as the token of 
his triumph. Palm trees were wrought in the walls 
of the temple of Jerusalem to signify the reward 
which awaited the victors in life's contest in the 
Heavenly Jerusalem. To St. John it was given to 



130 BLESSED PALM. 

behold in mystic vision that blessed city and he 
saw " a great multitude which no man could num- 
ber of all nations and tribes and peoples and tongues, 
standing before the throne and in sight of the 
Lamb, clothed with white robes and palms in their 
hands." 

When we receive the blessed palm let us look 
upon it as a pledge given to us by our Lord of the 
palm that awaits us in Heaven, and let us keep it 
with reverence as a holy thing, placing it over our 
beds, or wreathing it round the crucifix. But let 
us not forget that it is the distinctive mark of 
triumph by suffering and blood, and therefore it is 
sculptured on the tombs of the martyrs in the cata- 
combs. To reign with Christ we must suffer with 
Him, for the only way to heavenly triumph is the 
royal road of the cross. 



THE PASCHAL CANDLE. 

The blessing of the Paschal Candle is one of the 
most imposing ceremonies of Holy Saturday. 
Some have attributed the origin of this rite to Pope 
St. Zosimus, who reigned from 417 to 418 ; but 
the words of the Homan Breviary, in the 6th Les- 
son of this holy Pope's office,'* lead us to infer that 
it was already in use in the Basilicas or greater 
churches and that Losimus extended it to the 
parishes : " he granted permission to the parishes 
to bless the Paschal Candle." 

This blessed candle is much larger than those 
that are commonly used in ecclesiastical ceremonies. 
It was customary in some dioceses to have one 
weighing thirty-three pounds, to represent the years 
of our Saviour's mortal life. The wax of which it 

* On the 9th of February. 131 



132 THE PASCHAL CANDLE. 

is made is an emblem of the glorified Body of the 
R-isen Jesus, and therefore the candle is lighted on 
all the Sundays of the Easter time, but extingu- 
ished and removed after the gospel of Ascension 
Day, to indicate that He whom it represents is no 
longer amongst His children under the outward 
appearance of humanity, but only under the sacra- 
mental species of bread and wine. 

There are five incisions in the Paschal Candle, 
arranged in the form of a cross, into which five 
grains of incense are put during the blessing. 
The holes represent the Five Wounds, the marks 
of which our Lord keeps, and will for ever keep, 
in His Most Sacred Body. Like five suns, those 
Wounds are now shedding divine lustre over the 
blessed Court of Heaven, and are, according to 
theologians, the mute but most efficacious in- 
tercession of our Lord Jesus Christ with his Eternal 
Father for the members of the Church Militant and 
Church Suffering. The grains of incense repre- 
sent the spices with which the Holy Corpse was 
embalmed by Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus. 

The deacon of the Mass, not the celebrant priest, 
blesses the Paschal Candle, to show that the two 
disciples whom we have just mentioned, not the 
Apostles, had the precious privilege granted to 



THE PASCHAL CANDLE. 133 

them of preparing the dead Body for entombment, 
and that our Lord manifested Himself, on the day 
of His Resurrection, to Mary Magdalen, and the 
pious women before He appeared to St. Peter or 
any other of the Apostles. 

The prose or preface which the deacon chants in 
the ceremony of the blessing is called the Exultet, 
from the word with which it begins. It is the com- 
position of the great Sfc. Augustine, who died in 
the fifth century, and is one of the most beautiful 
and touching relics of the ancient Liturgy, which 
has come down to us. 

A list of the moveable feasts was sometimes 
attached to the Paschal Candle, or even cut into 
the wax. This custom existed at Rouen and 
Cluny until the last century. The present Ro- 
man Pontifical prescribes that the moveable feasts 
of the year be proclaimed on the festival of 
the Epiphany. Flowers were profusely wreathed 
around the candle. " What more fitting and fes- 
tive," says an old Ambrosian Missal, "than to 
adorn the Flower of Jesse with flowers ?" 

In the blessing of the baptismal font the Paschal 
Candle is plunged three times into the water, the 
celebrant praying meanwhile that the virtue of the 
Holy Spirit may descend into the sacred font. The 



134 THE PASCHAL CANDLE. 

immersion of the candle is emblematic of Christ's 
descent into the waters of the Jordan to receive 
Baptism, and its elevation, of our resurrection, as 
the ejttect of the Sacrament, from sin to a life of 
grace. 

Christ has redeemed us, by His Passion, from 
the bondage of Satan, the world and the flesh : a 
bondage a thousand times more galling than was 
that of Egypt to the children of Israel. The Pas- 
chal Candle represents Him as our Guide through 
the desert of life to the Promised Land of Heaven. 
When lighted, it is the pillar of fire that illumined 
the Hebrew camp by night; when extinguished, it 
is the cloud that directed their march by day. 

Jesus ! may Thy Easter Candle keep us ever in 
mind of Thee ! May it teach us to love Thee and 
to fear Thee, for Thou are set up both for the re- 
surrection and the ruin of many in Israel. That 
resurrection is Thy gift ; the ruin, if, unfortunately, 
it should be ours, will be of our own making: 
Destruction is thy oion, Israel ; thy hel^ is only 
in Me (Osee, xiii. 9.) 



XI. 

THE AGNUS DEI. 

This holy amulet is a wax-cake, bearing on 
it the image of a lamb surmounted by a cross. 
It is blessed by the Pope on the first Low Sunday 
(First Sunday after Easter) which follows his 
elevation to the Papacy, and not again until that 
same day every seventh year. This rite may 
have originated in the ancient custom of dis- 
tributing to the faithful on Low Sunday the 
remains of the Paschal candle blessed on Holy 
Saturday. Our pious ancestors received these 
precious relics with great veneration, in consid- 
eration of Him whom they represented; they 
used to burn them in their houses, fields, and 
vineyards, as preservatives against storms, tem- 
pests and the wiles of the devil. In some 
dioceses the fragments of the candles blessed 

135 



136 THE AGNUS DEI. 

on the festival of the Purification were put to 
the same holy use. 

The blessing of the Agnus Dei is as ancient, 
at least, as the ninth century : the great Alcuin, 
deacon of the church of York in England, and 
preceptor of Charlemagne of France, and Amal- 
arius, deacon of Metz, both writers of the ninth 
century, mention it. They tell us that on Holy 
Saturday the archdeacon used to pour wax into 
a clean vessel, mix it with oil, and fashion it 
into the shape of a lamb. On the Octave of 
Easter these waxen images w^ere distributed, 
after Communion, to the people, in order that 
they might burn them in their houses, and put 
them in their fields and vineyards. Some 
authors would ascribe an earlier origin to the 
Agnus Dei; among them is Cardinal Lamber- 
tini, who lived in the last century, and became 
Pope under the title of Benedict XIY. 

"We have called the Agnus Dei an amulet — 
perhaps our expression may be misunderstood, 
for the word is frequently taken in a bad sense. 
Amulet is derived from the Latin amolior, wdiich 
means I remove. According to this etymology, 
an amulet is something worn to remove or ward 
off danger, and when the thing so worn has 



THE AGNUS DEI. 137 

not, of its own nature, power to produce this 
effect to use it, confiding in it alone, would be 
the sin of superstition. Thus, when the old 
Pagans hung around their necks certain stones, 
metals, or bits of parchment, with mysterious 
signs and figures inscribed on them, and trusted 
to them for protection against disease and witch- 
craft, they only proved the stupid folly into 
which human nature left to itself is sure to run. 
Their amulets were sinful because there was no 
natural connection between them and the results 
expected from them; when these results did 
follow, they generally came from the devil, 
whose power over the corrupt heathen world, 
was greater than we suppose. The christian, 
too, has his amulets — the Crucifix, the Agnus 
Dei, the Scapular, Holy Medals, etc., but he 
does not, like the Pagan, put his trust in them, 
on account of any inherent virtue which he 
imagines them to have, nor does he look to the 
enemy of his soul for assistance. His hope is 
in the Living God, who, listening to the prayers 
of His beloved Spouse, the Catholic Church, 
blesses these material things, and bids His 
children keep them as memorials of Him, as 
tokens that His Divine Providence will ever 

shelter them beneath its protecting wing. 

12 



138 THE AGNUS DEI. 

The blessings attached to the Agnus Dei 
are enumerated in the prayers said by the 
Sovereign Pontiff when consecrating the wax: 
"0 God! Author of all Sanctity, Lord and 
Kuler ! whose fatherly love and care we ever 
experience, deign to bless, sanctify, and conse- 
crate, by the invocation of thy Holy Name, 
these waxen cakes, stamped with the image of 
the most Innocent Lamb, that, by seeing and 
touching them, the faithful may be invited to 
praise Thee ; that they may escape the fury of 
whirlwinds and tempests, and dangers from hail 
and thunder; that the evil spirits may tremble 
and fly when they behold the standard of the 
Sacred Cross impressed on the wax." He pro- 
ceeds to pray that all who devoutly use the 
Agnus Dei may be freed from pestilence, ship- 
wreck, fire, from the dangers of child-birth 
and from a sudden death. 

Now think you. Catholic reader, that the 
prayers of the Church, uttered by the heart 
and lips of her August Chief, the Yicar of our 
Lord on earth, are worth nothing? If we 
had faith, if we had but faith, we might see 
strange things come to pass in our souls and our 
bodies by a holy use of the Sacramentals ! 



THE AGNUS DEI. 139 

Hesychius, an ecclesiastical writer of the 
seventh century, says: "Not of their own power 
do priests impart a blessing ; but because they 
represent the person of Christ, they can, on 
account of Him who is in them, give the pleni- 
tude of benediction." But who, among the 
Church's priests, so immediately represents 
Jesus, the Great High Priest of our confession, 
as the Holy Father, successor of St. Peter, to 
whom, in preference to all the other Apostles, 
Christ entrusted the care of His flock? K 
ever "the plenitude of benediction" can be 
given on earth, surely it must come from him. 
Hence, he who piously uses the Agnus Dei, or 
any other Sacramental, associates his prayers 
and actions to those of the whole Church. 

The Agnus Dei, as the name imports, repre- 
sents Christ, the Lrnnb of Qod, the Lamh slain 
from the foundation of the world. Frequently 
does Holy Scripture apply the beautiful word 
Lamh to our Lord : first, because of His great 
meekness, ''and I was as a meek lamh that 
is carried to he a victim^^ (Jeremias, xi, 19;) 
secondly, because of His innocence, "knowing 
that you were not redeemed with corruptihle things 
.... hut with the precious Blood of Christ, as of 



140 THE AGNUS DEI. 

a lamh unspotted and undefiled. (St. Peter, 1, 
i, 18, 19;) thirdly because of His voluntary 
obedience unto death, "He shall he dumb as a 
lamh before his shearer T (Isaias, liii, 7.) 

The Paschal Lamb of the Old Law prefigured 
the true Lamb of the Law of grace. The church 
calls Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament the Lamb 
of Qod, And truly He is a gentle Lamb in 
His own dear Sacrament of Love, having no 
"will of his own, allowing Himself to be taken 
out of His tabernacle or put back, to be placed 
in the mouth of a saint or of a sinner, to be 
carried hither and thither as His priests may 
please. 

The Agnus Dei, then, represents our Lord, 
and he who would wear it devoutly must imi- 
tate Him in His lamb-like virtues, meekness, 
innocence, and indifference to the world. Meek- 
ness is that Christian pliableness of character 
which makes us bend and suit ourselves to every 
class of persons, as far as duty will allow. It 
prevents us from standing on our imaginary 
dignity, it rids us of melancholy, it causes us to 
be patient with ourselves and others, it makes 
our piety amiable by shedding over it the heav- 
enly sunlight of childlike gayety. The meek 



THE AGNUS DEI. 141 

Christian, and only he, has caught the true 
spirit of the devotion of the Agnus Dei. If we 
have not meekness, let us beg St. Francis of Sales 
to get it for us. He used to call it one of those 
lowly virtues which grow close to the foot of 
the Cross, which are all the more fragrant for 
being watered with the Blood which trickled 
down from the Sacred Heart. 

Innocence — ^purity, spotless purity of soul and 
body, is another virtue of the wearer of the 
Agnus Dei. Wax and the lamb have ever 
been the chosen emblems of the angelic virtue. 
When we touch or look at our holv amulet, let 
us remember that the breast on which it reposes 
must be sinless. And if the Angel of Satan is 
hovering round us, striving to inflict the death- 
blow on our souls, let us press the Agnus Dei 
closer to our hearts, that it may be a sign to 
him that he has no power over us, as was the 
blood of the paschal lamb on the doors of the 
Hebrews a sign to the Angel of the Lord. 

The third virtue which springs from a reve- 
rent use of the Agnus Dei is indifference to the 
world. The lamb is dumb before his shearer, 
teaching us silence when shorn of our fair name ; 
it is shy of a stranger, that we may learn from 



142 THE AGNUS DEI. 

it to be distrustful of th6 world and its vanities, 
that we may journey on, as strangers and 
pilgrims, till called to the marriage-feast of the 
Lamb in heaven. 

The Agnus Dei serves to call to our minds 
the promises of baptism. It represents the 
whiteness of our souls after being washed in 
the saving waters of regeneration, In allusion 
to this symbolism, a sub-deacon brings to the 
Pope, after that part of the Mass called the 
Agnus Dei, the wax images just blessed, and 
chants three times, "Holy Father! these 
are the young lambs which have announced to 
you alleluia. Behold, they have just now come 
to the fountains: they are filled with light, 
alleluia.' ' 

It would be a strange thing to see a sign 
on the door of a shop, and nothing inside to 
correspond to the sign. We wear over our hearts 
the Agnus Dei, as a sign that the Eucharistic 
Lamb frequently reposes inside those hearts. 
Frequent and Holy Communion is, then, a 
natural concomitant of devotion to the Agnus 
Dei. Surely the holy emblem he wears round 
his neck must often reproach him who keeps 
away from the feast of the Lamb. 



THE AGNUS DEI. 143 

The prayer to be said daily by those who 
wear the Agnus Dei is given in most prayer- 
books, but perhaps some of our readers who 
may feel moved to adopt this holy devotion, may 
be at a loss to find it, and hence we insert it : 

" Oh my Lord Jesus Christ ! the true Lamb 
that takest away the sins of the world ! by Thy 
mercy, which is infinite, paidon my iniquities, 
and by Thy Sacred Passion preserve me from 
all sin and evil. I carry about me this holy 
Agnus Dei in thy honor, as a preservative 
against my own weakness, and as an incentive 
to the practice of meekness, humility, and in- 
nocence which Thou hast taught. I offer my- 
self up to Thee as an entire oblation and in 
memory of that sacrifice of love which Thou 
offeredst for me on the cross, and in satisfaction 
for my sins. Accept, my God ! the oblation 
which I make, and may it be agreeable to Thee 
in the odor of sweetness. Amen." 

Pope Gregory XIII. has positively prohib- 
ited the Agnus Dei to be painted or exposed 
for sale. The silk covering of the sacred wax 
may, however, have holy words and images 
impressed on it. 



XII. 

THE ROSARY. 

The word Kosary means a garden of roses. 
The Paters and Aves composing it are so 
many flowers twined into a w^reath of prayer, 
the fragrance of which ascends in an odor 
of sweetness up to the throne of the Queen 
of Heaven. There are one hundred and fifty 
Hail Marys in the devotion, divided off into 
fifteen decades or tens, before each of which 
there is one Our FatJier and a Glory he to ilie 
Father, &c. One third of the Rosary, contain- 
ing five decades, is called a chaplet, and it is 
this which pious Catholics say every day. The 
entire Rosary is called also the Psalter or 
Psalmody of our Lady, because, as the Psalter 
of King David contains one hundred and fifty 
144 



THE ROSARY. 145 

psalms, so the Rosary contains one hundred and 
fifty Angelical salutations. 

The practice of using pebbles or beads for 
numbering prayers is as old as the third or 
fourth century. Palladius, an ecclesiastical 
writer of the 5th age, relates, in his Historia 
Lausiaca, that Abbot Paul made three hundred 
prayers daily which he reckoned by means of 
little stones. A canon of the Council of Cel- 
chyth, held in England in 816, commands that, 
on the death of a bishop, seven belts of Our 
Fathers should be said by the clergy every day, 
for the space of thirty days, for the repose of 
his soul ; and William of Malmesbury says that 
a Saxon Countess, named Godiva, desired, when 
on the point of death, that a string of gems 
on which she used to count her prayers, should 
be suspended round the neck of the statue of 
the Blessed Virgin, in a Church of Coventry. 
In fact the very name heads^ which we apply to 
the Rosary or Chaplet, proves that a similar 
devotion was in use among the Catholic Anglo- 
Saxons, for, in their language it signifies not 
globules or pebbles, but prayers, being from the 
same root as the present German word het^n. 

But these forms of prayer were not the 

13 



146 THE ROSARY. 

Kosary. Some have ascribed the origin of the 
devotion, as it now exists, to St. Benedict, the 
Patriarch of the Monastic life in the West, who 
flourished in the 6th century; others to Peter 
the Hermit, the originator, under God, of the 
Crusades, in the end of the 11th century. The 
claims of these venerable persons cannot, how- 
ever, be substantiated. Though both were 
devoted heart and soul to Mary, it did not 
please God to make use of them as his instru- 
ments in the establishment or propagation of 
the Eosary of His Blessed Mother. The time 
for the devotion had not yet come. It remained 
hidden in the coffers of heavenly benediction, 
to be opened at the prayers of Mary, when the 
urging wants of the Church should call for the 
special interposition of the Heavenly Mediatrix. 
That time came at last. The Albigensian 
heresy,* only another name for the absurd and 



* " The Albigenses owned two Principles or Creators, the one 
good, the other bad; the former the Creator of the invisible 
spiritual world, the latter the Creator of bodies, the tutor of 
the Jewish dispensation, and author of the Old Testament. 
They admitted two Christs, the one bad, who appeared upon 
earth, and the other good who never lived in this world ; they 
denied the resurrection of the flesh, and believed that our souls 



THE ROSARY. 147 

impious Maniclieism of the third and fourth 
centuries, began, about the year 1200, to make 
dreadful ravages in the South of France. Pil- 
lage, sacrilege and murder were the instruments 
which the sectaries used for the propagation of 
their system, and the enormities which they 
practised at last forced the secular arm to inter- 
pose for the defense of the property and lives 
of the children of the Church. Apostolic men 
went amongst them to win them back by charity 
and mildness to the obedience of reason and 
faith, but their labors were repaid with insult, 
ill-treatment, and assassination. The heart of 
the great St. Dominic, a Spaniard by birth, and 



were demons confined to our bodies in punishment of sins com- 
mitted by tliem in a former state of existence ; they condemned 
all the sacraments, rejected baptism as useless, abominated the 
Eucharist, practised neither a confession nor penance, believing 
marriage unlawful, and ridiculed purgatory, praying for the 
dead, images, crucifixes, and the ceremonies of the Church. 
They distinguished themselves into two sorts ; the Perfect, who 
boasted of living continently, ate neither flesh, nor eggs, nor 
cheese, abhorred lying and never swore ; and the Believers, who 
lived and ate as other men did, and were irregular in their 
manners, but were persuaded that they were saved by the faith 
of the Perfect, and that none of those who received the impo- 
sition of their hands were damned." — Butler's Lives of tlie 
Saints. — Life of St. Dominic, 4:th of August. 



148 THE ROSARY. 

founder of the order of Dominicans or Friars 
Preachers, who was laboring, by permission of 
Pope Innocent III., on this barren and ungrate- 
ful mission, bled with anguish at the sad pros- 
pect of spiritual ruin, which met his gaze. He 
turned to her to whom no one ever turned in 
vain. He begged her by the Blood of her 
Divine Son shed for sinners, and by the sword 
of sorrow, which pierced her own Immaculate 
Heart, to intercede for the perishing souls for 
whom he preached and prayed and suffered. 
Need it be said that such a petition was heard? 
Oh! Mother Mary! Refuge of sinners! Con- 
soler of the afflicted! indeed it would have 
been a miracle, such as never before occurred, 
had it been rejected! Dominic prayed, and 
Mary heard his prayer, and revealed to him 
the Holy Eosary. What the sword of the stern 
old soldier, Simon de Montfort,"^ could not do, 
what even the previous labors of St. Dominic 
and his saintly co-operators failed to accomplish, 
Mary's Crown of Roses did. The meditation 
of the fifteen mysteries of our Lord and Lady's 

* The General of the Crusade against the Albigenses. 



THE ROSARY. 149 

life and death, accompanying each decade, in- 
structed the isrnorant in the articles of faith, 
whilst the recitation of the Our Fatlier and 
Hail Mary filled the hearts of sinners with 
contrition and love, and drew down the bless- 
ings of Heaven. The work of conversion went 
bravely on : Dominic reaped a harvest of souls, 
and our sweet Mother a harvest of glory. 

From that day to this, the devotion of the 
Rosary has never lost its hold on the affections 
of the faithful. To recount the wonders that 
it has wrought and will continue to work until 
the day of doom in heaven, on earth, and in 
purgatory, would require an inspired tongue, 
and the vision of prophecy. The glory that 
surrounded it at its birth went on increasing, 
until it culminated with dazzling radiance on 
the meridian of the Mary-protected Church, 
towards the close of the 16th age. The battle 
of Lepanto, gained on the 7th of October, 1571, 
by the Christian fleet, under the command of 
Don John of Austria, over the formidable armar 
ment of the Turks, at the time that the sodality 
of the Rosary in Rome was walking in solemn 
procession addressing fervent prayers to the 
Throne of Mercy, proclaimed to the Catholic 



150 THE ROSARY. 

world the power of Mary, and the motherly 
care that she ever exercises over her servants. 
The prayers of the Confraternity of the Rosary, 
as they arose from the Eternal City, on that 
first Sunday of October, rent on their way to 
Heaven, the dark thunder-cloud of Turkish 
invasion, that had hung, for centuries, lowering 
o*er the eastern horizon of Europe. 

The holy Pope, St. Pius Y., who then occu- 
pied the chair of St. Peter, was informed, by 
revelation, from heaven, of the victory at the 
very moment that it was won. In gratitude to 
the Divine Mother and her Son, he commanded 
that a yearly commemoration should be made, 
on the first Sunday of October, of St. Mary of 
Victory. Gregory XITI., his successor, estab- 
lished the Festival of the Rosary, to be cele- 
brated, on the same day, in all the churches 
which contained a chapel or an altar dedicated 
under the invocation of the Blessed Virgin of 
the Rosary. Clement X., in 1671, at the 
prayer of the Queen of Spain, extended the 
feast to all the Spanish dominions. Another 
victory gained over the Turks, in 1716, under 
circumstances precisely similar to those of the 
victory of Lepanto, induced Clement XL to 



THE ROSARY. 151 

grant the celebration of the Festival of the 
Rosary to the Universal Church. 

Such is the history of the origin and progress 
of this holy devotion; let us now consider 
briefly the intrinsic claims that it has to our 
veneration and love. The prayers that com- 
pose it are most holy in their origin. The Our 
Father was taught by our Lord Himself, and is 
a complete synopsis of Christian doctrine and 
morality. We call God Father, thereby indi- 
cating His Divine Paternity. Father implies 
Son, and where these two. exist, there is mutual 
love between them. The Eternal Father and 
His Only Begotton Son love one another with 
an eternal Love, and that Love is a Divine 
Person, the Holy Ghost. But God is not only 
Father, but He is Our Father, by creation, pre- 
servation and the imparting of His grace. 
Grace implies Jesus, the God- Man, the Source 
of all the graces of intelligent creatures, and he 
who mentions that Adorable Name fits the key 
to the treasury of wisdom and love contained 
in the mysteries of Incarnation and Redemption. 
Bow down, Christian soul, in awe and adoration 
before the throne of the Eternal God! See 
how in the first words of the prayer that He 



152 THE ROSARY. 

has taught us are contained the three great 
mysteries of our faith ! What should we find 
if we were to go through it in detail ? Verily, 
nothing else than these other great truths — the 
rewards of heaven, the existence of evil spirits, 
the punishments of hell, the Sacraments of Pen- 
ance and the Most Holy Eucharist, and the 
principal moral obligations of our religion, as 
the duty of filial love for God, conformity to 
His Divine Will, confidence in His Providence, 
fraternal charity and the avoiding of the occa- 
sions of sin. 0, Adorable Lord ! whose words 
so fruitful in meaning as Thine, whose so full 
of hidden wisdom, whose so full of love! 

The Hail Mary is composed of three parts. 
"Hail full of grace, the Lord is with thee; 
blessed art thou among w^omen," were the 
words of the Archangel Gabriel, when announc- 
ing to the Blessed Virgin that she was to be- 
come the Mother of God. The latter part of 
the same salutation, with an additional clause, 
was repeated by St. Elizabeth, inspired by the 
Holy Ghost, when Mary visited her in the hill- 
country of Judea: "Blessed art thou among 
women and blessed is the Fruit of thy womb." 
The General Council of Ephesus held, in 431, 



THE ROSARY. 153 

against Nestorius, the heretical Archbishop of 
Constantinople, who impiously asserted that 
Mary was not the Mother of God, added the 
third part : " Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray 
for us sinners, now and at the hour of our 
death." 

The Hail Mary is both a hymn of praise to 
the Blessed Virgin for the glory of her Divine 
Maternity, and a prayer of intercession for her 
protection during life and at the moment of 
death. Heaven is filled with jubilee when it is 
said; the beautiful angels bow down in rev- 
erent adoration before the throne of their Queen ; 
the glorified children of men, of whom no one 
ever reached the country of the Blessed without 
the assistance of Mary, hymn a new song of 
gratitude to their Mother and Mediatrix, and 
a new sea of divine radiance from the Holy 
Trinity breaks around her throne in a spray of 
dazzHng splendor. At the words, hlessed is the 
Fruit of thy woiiib, her Immaculate Heart turns 
with unutterable love to the Sacred Heart of 
Jesus, and the flames of those two fiery furnaces 
of divine charity unite and arise before the 
Ever Blessed Three, the only offering, with the 
Adorable Sacrament, worthy of the Majesty 



154 THE ROSARY. 

the of Godhead. Child of Mary! will you 
refuse this increase of accidental glory to your 
Mother ? One fervent Hail Mary can give it, 
and the third part of the Rosary will repeat it 
fifty times. If you say the beads every day 
during a month, you will work wonders in 
heaven more than fifteen hundred times. Mary 
will be your debtor, and never will her grat- 
itude be satisfied until she welcomes you to 
heaven. " Love," said St. Augustine, "" and do 
what you please;" yes, let us all love Mary, 
and then we can, in all things, do our own will, 
because, in all things, it will be conformed to 
hers as hers is to that of Jesus. That love will 
burn sin and affection for sin out of our hearts, 
and bring our Lord into them with all His 
treasures of grace and sweetness. 

The Eosary opens the gates of Purgatory. 
"We may well believe that God will deign to 
release daily one soul from that place of exile 
and punishment for one pair of beads said with 
devout intention, and the application of the in- 
dulgences attached to the Rosary. Now think, 
good reader, what a thing it is to have thirty- 
one souls in heaven, who would not have been 
there so soon had it not been for your beads ! 



THE ROSARY. 155 

They will be indebted to you, Mary will be in- 
debted to you, her Divine Son will be indebted 
to you. And what will be your recompense ? 
The grace of a happy death, the crowning gift 
of all God's gifts, that of final perseverence. 
Mother Mary ! Queen of the Rosary ! we re- 
solve to say the beads every day ; neither busi- 
ness, nor pleasure, nor fatigue, nor disgust, 
shall hinder us from offering thee this tribute 
of love. Receive our promise, and seal it by 
obtaining for us from thy Son the grace to 
keep it. 

The versicle. Glory he to the Father and to 
the Son and to the Holy Qhost, is said before 
each decade of the Rosary. It is a salutation 
of praise to the Blessed Trinity. The name 
doxology, applied to it, is derived from the Greek, 
meaning a word of praise or glory. 

The generally received opinion attributes the 
origin of the doxology to the 1st Council of 
Nice, held in 325, against the Arian heretics 
who denied the Divinity of the Eternal Word. 
But Pope Benedict XIY. {De Festo SS. Trin- 
itatis) proves that it existed and was used by 
the faithful before the time of that Council, and 
that it arose naturally from the formula of bap- 



156 THE ROSARY. 

tism given by our Lord to the Apostles — hap- 
tizing them in the name of tlie Fatlver and of 
the Son and of the Holy Ghost (St. Matt, xxviii.) 
The response, as it was in the begmning, etc., was 
most probably added by the Nicene Synod, to 
meet the errors of the Arians who asserted 
that the Son was not born of the Father in the 
beginning^ that is, from all eternity, but in time. 

The same learned Pontiff combats the opinion 
that the practice of adding Glory he to the 
Father, etc., at the end of the Psalms in the 
Divine Office, was introduced into the West by 
the order of Pope St. Damasus, in the end of 
the 4tli century, by the advice of St. Jerome, 
who had heard it sung by the Oriental monks, 
though this opinion has in its favor the 6th 
Lesson in the Office of St. Damasus (December 
11th :) Statuit, ut, quod pluribus jam locis erat 
in usu, psalmi,per omnes ecclesias, die noctuque 
ab alternis canerentur, et in fine cuj usque psalmi 
diceretur, Gloria Patri, etc. Benedict XIV. 
thinks that the practice in question arose from 
a Canon of the Council of Narbonne, in 589, 
which was, in course of time, adopted through- 
out the Church. 

There are few devotions to which the Holy 



THE ROSARY. 157 

See has granted so many indulgences as to the 
Rosary ; one hundred days for each Our Father 
and Hail Mary, and a plenary indulgence once 
a year, on any day the reciter may choose. To 
gain the latter the usual conditions of a plen- 
ary indulgence must be complied with, that is, 
confession, communion, and prayers for the 
wants of the Church. It need not be said that 
a person must be in a state of grace, because 
an indulgence, being the remission of the tern- 
'poi^al punishment due to sin, cannot avail until 
the sin itself, and, consequently, its eternal 
punishment, are removed. 

To gain the indulgences of the Eosary, the 
beads must be blessed by a priest having the 
requisite faculties, and the recitation of the 
prayers must be accompanied, according to very 
many who have written on the subject, by 
meditation on the mysteries of our Lord and 
Lady, if the person reciting the beads is capa- 
ble of meditating. 

THE FIVE GLORIOUS MYSTERIES 
For Sundays^ Wednesdays, and Saturdays. 

1. The Resurrection. 4. The Assumption of the B. 

2. The Ascension. V. M. 

3. The Descent of the Holy 6. The Coronation of the B. 

Ghost. V. M. in Heaven. 



158 THE ROSARY. 

THE FIVE JOYFUL MYSTERIES 
For Mondays and Thursdays. 

1. The Annunciation. 4. The Presentation of our 

2. The Visitation. Lord in the Tempie. 

8. The Birth of our Lord. 5. The Finding of our Lord 

in the Temple. 

THE FIVE SORROWFUL MYSTERIES 

For Tuesdays and Fridays. 

1. The Agony in the Garden. 4. The Carriage of the Cross. 

2. The Scourging at tlie Pillar. 5. The Crucifixion and Death 

3. The Crowning with Thorns. of our Lord. 

Many pious persons make it a point to have 
their beads always about them during the day, 
and to place them around their neck or under 
their pillow at night. Faithful soldiers of Mary, 
they have their arms always in their hands. 
Let bad thoughts attack them or dangers me- 
nace, and at once the faithful fingers are on the 
beads, the Hail Mary is on their lips, the im- 
age of their Mother is before them, and the 
victory is won. Let us adopt this easy and 
salutary practice ; it will save us from at least 
one temptation, that of omitting to say our 
beads because we have them not at hand. 



XII. 

THE SCAPULAR 

OF OUR LADY OF MOUNT CARMEL. 

The church is one in doctrine and in govern- 
ment, yet the modes in which she manifests the 
inward life which she receives from the ever- 
continuing action of Christ, her Divine Head, 
are countless in their beautiful varieties. She 
is, at the same time, contemplative and active, 
abiding in the desert and dwelling in commu- 
nity, the physician of the bodies as well as of 
the souls of men, the teacher of the ignorant, 
the civilizer of barbarians, the defender of the 
Gospel at home, its missionary abroad. These 
different and apparently incongruous functions 
of her sublime life she performs on a large 
scale by means of her Religious Orders. These 

159 



160 THE SCAPULAR. 

holy associations are members of Christ's mys- 
tic body, each having its different office, yet all 
conspiring, by their harmonious action, to the 
strength and beauty of the organism to which 
they belong. They are the various ornaments 
of the golden robe of splendor which Christ has 
cast around His Spotless Spouse, the Church. 

Numerous as are the differences in origin, 
mode of life and aim of the Religious Orders, 
they all, without exception, agree in cultivating 
and propagating a most tender devotion to 
Mary, the Mother of God, and many of the 
most beautiful and touching practices of piety 
in her honor, now existing in the Church, have 
been introduced by them. The Rosary, as we 
saw in our last number, is a Dominican devo- 
tion, and an unwavering faith in the Immacu- 
late Conception, and a burning love for that 
greatest of Mary's privileges, next to the Divine 
Maternity, characterized the Seraphic Order of 
St. Francis, centuries before the mystery was 
defined to be an article of faith. Devotion to the 
Sacred Name of Mary found a home in the Cis- 
tercian Order, a nestling place in the heart of the 
greatest of its abbots, the illustrious St. Bernard 
of Clairvaux : respice stellarn^ voca Mariam : look 



THE SCAPULAR. 161 

io the star, call on Mary in dangers, in 

troubles and in douhts think of Mary, call an 
Mary, were the words, sweet as honey, that 
distilled from his glowing lips which the coal 
of Mary's love had touched. The Society of 
Jesus, the bulwark of the Church in modern 
times, shows its devotion to Mary by establish- 
ing, in the colleges under its direction, sodalities 
and confraternities in her honor. The two 
Scapulars* of which we are now about to treat 
have been given by God to His Church through 
the instrumentality of Religious Orders; the 
Brown Scapular, or that of Our Lady of Mount 
Carmel, was introduced by the Carmelites; the 
Red Scapular, by the Lazarists. 

This agreement of all the Orders in devotion 
to the Blessed Virgin, though differing in so 
many other devotions, proves that it is not one 
of several modes of manifesting the vital energy 
of the Church, but one which is an integral and 
essential part of the Christian system. Mary 
is not, as Father Faber shows in his Growth in 
Holiness, a mere appendage or ornament of true 



* Scapular, from its Latin derivation, means a shoulder gar- 
ment. 

14 



162 THE SCAPULAR. 

religion : she is the mystical neck uniting the 
Church to Jesus, its Head : she is so completely 
interwoven, like a golden thread, in the web of 
Christian doctrine, that to separate her from it 
is to destroy it. The particular manner of 
honoring her may vary with times and countries 
and dispositions, but the devotion itself will 
live on through the ages to be transplanted with 
the Church Militant, when time has ceased to 
be, to those ha^ppy courts over which Mary 
presides as Queen. 

These general remarks have led us away 
from our immediate subject, the Scapular of 
Mount Carmel, yet they may be useful in show- 
ing how all devotions in honor of the Blessed 
Virgin, and all the Sacramentals which concern 
her are expressions of one great truth — that 
Mary is to be reverenced because of her con- 
nection with Jesus. 

The Carmelites claim to be one of the oldest 
Orders in the Church, tracing their descent 
from the immediate disciples of the Prophets 
Elias and Eliseus, who lived more than eight 
hundred years before the coming of our Lord. 
They derive their name from Carmel, a moun- 
tain of Palestine; on which the first religious 



THE SCAPULAR. 163 

of the Order built their cells. Whether they 
can make good their claims to so venerable an 
antiquity is not for us to determine; from the 
end of the twelfth century, however, their his- 
tory is clear and reliable. Albert, Patriarch of 
Jerusalem, gave them a rule in 1209, which 
was afterwards approved by the Holy See. The 
troubles consequent upon the continual irrup- 
tions of the Saracens into Palestine induced the 
good religious to look out for a safer asylum, 
and one in which they would be able to practise, 
in its perfection, their rigorous rule. Accord- 
ingly, they passed into Europe, in the middle 
of the thirteenth century, and rapidly spread 
through the different Christian kingdoms, owing 
to the protection and favor of the Holy See, 
and the ability and zeal of the Generals of the 
Order. One of the most illustrious of those 
Generals was Simon Stock. He was an English- 
man by birth, and, from his early years, was 
remarkable for the austerity and stainless inno- 
cence of his life and his tender devotion to the 
Blessed Virgin. Mary rewarded his confidence 
and love, as she did those of his contemporary, 
St. Dominic. She appeared to him in a vision 
and delivered to him the Brown Scapular, 



164 THE SCAPULAR. 

promising special graces to those who should 
devoutly wear it. The new devotion was 
eagerly embraced by all ranks of society; the 
priest^ the king, the noble and the commoner 
prided themselves on wearing the livery of the 
Queen of Heaven. The Popes approved it by 
granting indulgences to it and establishing a 
festival in its honor. And thus it has continued 
in the Church until our day, the holy rival of 
the Rosary in winning souls to the love of Mary 
and her Divine Son. 

Some may smile at a devotion based on no 
better foundation than a vision. Yet they can 
not deny, without rejecting the Bible and the 
testimony of ecclesiastical and profane history, 
the occurrence of visions in past times. If 
supernatural interferences have taken place, 
they may take place again; and whether such 
has been the case in any particular instance 
can be ascertained by the rules of historical 
criticism. Now, in regard to St. Simon Stocky 
we have the testimony of his secretary, Suvan- 
ingron, who, relating the vision, says, hanc ego 
iimneHtiis^ honiiTW Dei dictante^ scribeham: this 
accowit I have written^ though unwoi^thy of the 
lumoTy under the dictation of the man of God, 



THE SCAPULAR. 165 

His testimony has been received, after standing 
the test of an historical and theological sifting, 
by every unprejudiced mind that has examined 
the subject. It is confirmed by the high sanc- 
tity of the parties in the transaction, by the 
miracles, attested under oath, wrought by 
means of the Scapular, and by the spiritual 
blessings conferred on those who devoutly wear 
it. 

The advantages which the Scapular procures 
us are threefold : it puts us under the par- 
ticular protection of Mary; it gives us a par- 
ticipation in all the good works of the Carmelite 
Order, and places within our reach numerous 
indulgences. 

When we put on the blessed Scapular, we 
clothe ourselves with the uniform of Mary's 
army, we enroll ourselves under her banner, we 
choose her for our Mother and our Queen. 
Like the domestics of the wise woman, whose 
praise is in the Book of Proverbs, we are 
clothed with double garments to protect us 
against the cold winds and storms of spiritual 
adversity. The Scapular is the pledge of the 
sacred contract that we have entered into with 
the Blessed Virgin ; and if we be faithful to it 



166 THE SCAPULAR. 

on our part, she will reward us with the choicest 
blessings of her Son. 

It is piously believed, to use the words of the 
Roman Breviary (in the Lessons of the 16th of 
July,) that Mary will obtain a speedy release 
from Purgatory for those who wear the Scap- 
ular in life and die a Christian death. There 
is nothing absurd in this. Jesus is the King of 
Purgatory ; then Mary must be Queen. Is it 
not natural to suppose that she is the Mediatrix 
of pardon for the suffering souls, as she is of 
grace and mercy for us ? And what day more 
suitable to exercise her intercession for them 
than Saturday, which the Church has consecra- 
ted to her honor ? Of course it would be the sin 
of superstition to believe that a person dying in 
mortal sin could escape the fires of hell by the 
fact of wearing Mary's livery. Nor need we 
suppose that God's justice remits, in favor of the 
members of the Scapular Confraternity, any of 
the Purgatorial punishment due to sin. It can 
crowd into an hour, by increase of intensity, 
sufferings which otherwise might be protracted 
through years. 

The devotion of the Scapular beautifully 
illustrates the Catholic doctrine of the Commu- 



THE SCAPULAR. 167 

nion of Saints ; it associates us to all the good 
works of the Carmelites. Their satisfactions 
for sin becomes ours, their impetrations for 
blessings belong to us. The Scapular is the 
key to the rich treasure of graces which, for 
centuries, has been accumulating in the Church 
by the Masses and missionary labors, and 
studies and toil, and praying and watching and 
fasting of holy Carmelites all over the world. 
Our own poor penances for the sins of our past 
life are little worth, but joined to the super- 
abundant satisfactions of the Saints, they are in- 
creased in value a thousand fold. 

The indulgences annexed to the Scapular af- 
ford another illustration of the Communion of 
Saints. By gaining them we cancel the debt 
of temporal punishment due to our transgres- 
sions ; we offer to God, in place of our own 
satisfactions, those of Christ, the Blessed Vir- 
gin and the Saints. Yet various acts are re- 
quired on our part to appropriate them; we 
must free our souls from the stain of sin by co- 
operating with God's holy grace, which urges 
us to receive the Sacrament of Penance, and 
we must fulfil the other conditions prescribed 
by the Sovereign Pontiff in the grant of the in- 



168 THE SCAPULAR. 

dulgence. The day of admission into the Con- 
fraternity of the Scapular^ the Feast of Our 
Lady of Mount Carmel, on the 16 th of July, 
and the hour of death, have a plenary indulg- 
ence annexed to them. The numerous partial 
indulgences may be found in most manuals of 
devotion. To participate in the benefits of the 
Confraternity it is necessary to receive the 
Scapular from a priest who has been empowered 
to give it, and to wear it constantly. It is also 
advised that the members should recite daily 
seven Our Fathers and Hail Marys ^ or the 
Litany of the Blessed Virgin. 

These, then, are the blessings which Mary 
offers us if we assume her habit ; but in doing 
so we contract the obligation of serving her as 
faithful vassals and imitating her virtues, in 
proportion to our grace. He who professes 
himself her client, and yet neglects the duties 
of his state of life, insults her and incurs the 
anger of her Son. No exterior symbols will 
profit us if the interior spirit be wanting ; the 
Scapular will not save us if we lead bad lives, 
any more than will the livery of his country 
screen the coward or the deserter from his 
merited punishment. 



THE SCAPULAR. 169 

When the Prophet Elias passed from earth, 
in a chariot of fire, he dropped his robe to his 
faithful follower, Eiiseus. The disciple cast 
the garment about his shoulders, and, at the 
same moment, the spirit of his departed master 
was infused into his heart. So it should be 
with us. Mary's Scapular hangs around the 
neck to no purpose, unless the soul clothe itself 
with the virtues that she practised. Let us 
apply to ourselves what St. Paul wrote to the 
Galatians : for as many of you as have been 
baptized in Christ have put on Christ — as many 
of us as have received the Scapular of Mary, 
have put on Mary. 

It is related of Boleslas lY., King of Poland, 
"that he always carried about with him the 
portrait of his father, as the witness and guide 
of his actions. Whenever he had to pass any 
decree or engage in any important affair, he 
looked at the image of his parent and pro- 
nounced these admirable words: ''0, my father! 
do not permit me to dishonor the blood that 
flows in my veins; do not permit that my 
tongue should utter any word, or my hand 
perform any action, unworthy of thy name 

and my high r^nk." In like manner, when we 

15 



170 THE SCAPULAR. 

look at the Scapular and the image of Mary 
attached to it, let us cry out with a holy en- 
thusiasm : " 0, Sweet Mother ! do not suffer us 
to dishonor thy name or the title of thy chil- 
dren.'* 



XIV. 

THE RED SCAPULAR 

OF THE PASSION AND OF THE SACRED HEARTS OF 
MARY AND JESUS.* 

On the evening of the 26th of July, 1846, 
the Octave of the Feast of St. Yincent of Paul, 
one of the Sisters of Charity, in France, had a 
vision of our Lord, which she thus relates : " I 
had gone to the chapel before Benediction, and 
when there, our Lord appeared to me. He 
held in His right Hand a scarlet-colored scap- 
ular, the two parts of which were joined to- 
gether by worsted strings, of the same color. 
On one side of the scapular He was represented 

* The account of this Sacramental is translated, in great part, 
from a French Prayer-book, compiled for the use of the Sisters 
of Charity. 

171 



172 THE RED SCAPULAR. 

as crucified ; the most cruel instruments of His 
Passion were lying at the foot of the cross — 
the scourge, the hammer and the robe which 
had covered His bleeding Body. Around the 
Crucifix was the inscription. Holy Passion of 
our Lord Jesus Christ save us. The other ex- 
tremity of the scapular had depicted on it the 
Sacred Heart of Jesus and that of His Holy 
Mother; a cross placed between them seemed 
to spring up from both hearts, and the encir- 
cling motto was, Sacred Hearts of Jesiis and 
Mary protect us. 

About eighteen months ago while meditating, 
during Holy Mass, upon the Passion of our 
Lord Jesus Christ, I thought I saw Him hang- 
ing on the cross. The ghastly paleness of His 
countenance made a deep impression on me, 
and my whole body became covered with a cold 
sweat. Our Lord's Head was inclined; I 
thought it was the long thorns that covered 
His adorable Brow, which caused it to take this 
posture. At the same instant our Lord sud- 
denly raised His head, and the thorns were 
violently forced into His eyes and temples. . . 
Never can I forget that moment. There was 
something terrible in the pain He must have 



THE RED SCAPULAR. 173 

experienced in the rude sliock of His sacred 
Head against the wood of the cross. I was 
filled with anguish and trembling. And the 
Blessed Virgin was there. Jesus ! Mary ! 
what suiFerings. From that moment the 
Passion of our well-beloved Saviour has been 
always before my eyes. " Thou must console 
Me," said our Lord to me, ^'in the sorrows of 
My Passion ; thou must receive the shreds of 
My Flesh, torn from My Body by the Pre- 
torian whips, and My Blood poured out on 
Calvary." 

The words of Jesus Christ were like so many 
wounds in my soul. It is almost impossible 
for me not to dwell on them continually, and to 
keep alive the terrible, yet sweet impression, 
they made on me. The sufferings of His 
sacred Humanity touch me more than the 
splendors of His glory, and I would feel less 
desire for the throne which I hope he has pre- 
pared for me in heaven, if I were not to see 
there the Holy Wounds of Jesus Christ glittering 
like so many suns. Ah ! Our Lord knows well 
that, if it were possible for me to resist His 
greatness, I must needs yield myself the captive 
of His sufferings ! I could not understand how 



174 THE RED SCAPULAR. 

the thought of the dolors of Jesus Christ fills 
my soul with such ineffable delight if He Him- 
self had not told me. *' Thou canst not com- 
prehend My Love, but by My sufferings ; and 
the force of this Love will so weaken the feeling 
of pain that it will be entirely absorbed in 
Love." I do not know whether I shall be un- 
derstood, when I say that my heart is so nar- 
row, so limited, that, through excess of feeling, 
it becomes at times unablo to feel any more. 

Oh ! how Our Lord wishes that we should 
think of His sufferings ! how His Holy Mother 
desires it ! One Sunday evening when I was 
making the Way of the Cross, it seemed to me, 
at the thirteenth station, that the Blessed 
Yirgin put into my arms the Sacred Body of 
our Adorable Master and said to me : " The 
world is going to ruin because it does not think 
of the Passion of Jesus Christ; do all that you 
can to get it to think of it ; do all that you can 
for the world's salvation." 

I do not know how all this happened, but at 
those moments in which I believe I see our 
Lord, I feel that within me which I cannot ex- 
press. It is like a total forgetfulness of every- 
thing that exists, a perfect solitude in which I 



THE RED SCAPULAR. 175 

am alone with Him : methinks I really see the 
object which occupies mj thoughts. For ex- 
ample, on the occasion I have just mentioned, 
I felt the icy coldness of our Saviour's corpse, 
I saw His gaping wounds. 

It is the Passion of Jesus Christ which con- 
verts sinners and reanimates the faith of the 
just. Who can resist a God dead for love of 
men ? As for me, our Lord has always inun- 
dated my soul with His sweetest favors, at 
those moments in which He has placed in my 
heart a more lively remembrance of His sujffer- 
ings. People think that I am sick, but I am 
not so; I suffer much and yet I am content. 
Why hast thou wished my Adorable Saviour, 
that I should always think of thy Holy Pas- 
sion ? Why hast Thou wished that I should 
see Thee so often upon the cross? Ah! hast 
Thou not said that Thou couldst find no one to 
help Thee tread the wine press ! Our merciful 
Saviour earnestly desires that we should wear 
the Scapular which he has shown me, that we 
should clothe ourselves with Him and with love 
of His sufferings. The Holy Cross is so pow- 
erful for the conversion of infidels and heretics ! 
What efficacy in a Friday indulgence (which 



176 THE RED SCAPULAR. 

those who wear the Red Scapular gain) in re- 
awakening in all hearts the remembrance of 
the Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ! 

On Trinity Sunday our Divine Saviour 
showed me, during my meditation, a beautiful 
and translucent river. Many persons were on 
its banks; those who plunged in became all 
resplendent with brilliancy; diamonds and gold 
seemed to fall from their hands. Those who 
fled became enveloped in a black smoke which 
made them most disagreeable to the sight. I 
asked our Saviour the explanation of the vision. 
He told me that this beautiful river represented 
His Mercy, always ready to receive the repent- 
ance of the sinner and give it a value. my 
Jesus! how little we think of Thy Mercy and 
of Thy sufferings which have given us a claim 
to it." Here ends the recital of the sister. 

The apparition of our Lord, holding in His 
Hand the Scapular of His Passion, was renewed 
several times ; it took place on the Feast of the 
Exaltation of the Holy Cross, 14th September, 
1846, with this particular circumstance, that 
the sister thought she heard our Lord address- 
ing her in these consoling words: "All those 
who wear this Scapular tvill receive on every Fri- 



THE RED SCAPULAR. 177 

day a great increase of faitli^ hope and charity. ^^ 
When the sister was told of the great difficulty 
there would be in getting this devotion author- 
ized, she replied : " Our Divine Saviour desires 
the establishment of the Scapular of His Pas- 
sion. He will, in a moment known to Himself 
alone, smooth away all the difficulties which 
ordinarily arise against new devotions, and 
make the precious day of His Death a day rich 
in blessings for the Holy Church. I am happy 
in knowing that this devotion will constitute 
one of the treasures of the Congregation of the 
Mission."* 

The prediction of the holy sister was fulfilled. 
When the Superior General of the Congrega- 
tion of the Mission was in Rome, in June 1847, 



* The Congregation of the Priests of the Mission, was founded 
in France by St. Vincent of Paul, and' was approved by Pope 
Urban VIII., in 1632. Its members are called also Lazarisis 
from St. Lazare, the name of their chief house in Paris. The 
institution of the Daughters of Charity owes its origin to the 
same Saint, and is under the general supervision of the supe- 
rior of the Lazarists. There is, we believe, but one branch of 
the Daughters of CJiarity in the United States, that of St. 
Joseph's, Emmittsburg. The Sisters of Charity, though they 
always revere St. Vincent as their Father, are not officially 
affiliated to his order. 



178 THE r'ed scapular. 

he laid all the circumstances of the case before 
the Vicar of Jesus Christ, Pope Pius IX. He 
was surprised at the favor with which the new 
devotion was received. Far from raising any 
objections, His Holiness expressed his happi- 
ness in seeing a new means employed for the 
conversion of sinners, and he authorized, by a 
rescript of the 25th of June, 1847, all the 
priests of the Congregation of the Mission to 
bless and distribute to the faithful the Scapular 
of the Passion of Jesus Christ. 

On one side of the Eed Scapular is the image 
of Jesus on the Cross, surrounded by the in- 
struments of His Passion, to remind us that 
His sufferings have shut hell and opened heaven 
for us; on the other side is His Heart burning 
with love, to indicate that the excess of his suf- 
ferings was the effect of His excess of tender- 
ness. The Immaculate Heart of Mary is placed 
beside that of Jesus. The same love consumes 
them, and they are immolated in one and the 
same sacrifice. Hence, they are represented as 
united, and the cross is placed between them as 
belonging to both. Jesus has saved the world 
by His Cross, and Mary has co-operated in its 
salvation by consenting to His death. The 



THE RED SCAPULAR. 179 

Heart of Jesus pierced on the Cross is the ever- 
flowing fountain of all good — the Immaculate 
Heart of Mary at the foot of the Cross is the 
reservoir which receives the waters of that 
fountain, the canal which communicates them 
to the souls of men. 

Let us make a trinity of hearts by joining 
ours to those of Jesus and Mary, and may the 
Red Scapular of the Passion be the pledge of 
their eternal union. 

The Indulgences granted by Pope Pius IX. 
to those who wear the Red Scapular are: 

1. An indulgence of seven years and seven 
times forty days, on every Friday, on condition 
of receiving Holy Communion and reciting fivQ 
times the Our Father, Hail Mary and Glory he 
to the Father, etc., in honor of our Lord's Passion. 

2. An indulgence of three years and three 
times forty days for meditating, at any time, 
for the space of half an hour, on the Passion. 

An indulgence of two hundred days for kiss- 
ing the Scapular with feelings of devotion and 
saying : We heseech Thee, therefore, heljp Thy 
servants whom Thou hast redeemed with Thy 
Precious Blood. 



180 THE RED SCAPULAR. 

4. A plenary indulgence on every Friday for 
those who, having confessed and communicated, 
devoutly meditate for a short time upon the 
Passion of our Lord, and pray for the intentions 
of the Church. 



XV. 

BLESSED FOOD. 

The Kitual contains formulas of benediction 
for many kinds of food, as of lambs, eggs, new 
fruits and bread. The latter article, when 
solemnly blessed at High Mass and distributed 
to the faithful, is called the Eulogy, which 
means strictly, from its Greek derivation, any 
blessing or blessed thing, but which, in eccle- 
siastical language, is specifically applied to 
blessed bread. 

It was customary, during the first centuries, 
to communicate every day; some even thought 
that they were obliged to receive the Blessed 
Sacrament as often as they assisted at Mass, so 
that if the}'- had that happiness several times a 
day, they ought to participate, at each Mass, 

181 



182 BLESSED FOOD. 

of the Bread of Angels The increasing tem- 
poral prosperity of the faithful, consequent 
upon the cessation of persecution and the re- 
cognition of Christianity by the state, tended, 
by insensible degrees, to wean their minds and 
hearts from heavenly things, and to cool their 
burning love for the Mystery of Christ's Body 
and Blood. The inroads of the barbarian tribes 
of the North, the breaking up of the Roman 
Empire, and the changes and convulsions which 
necessarily followed, produced a more disastrous 
effect upon the souls of many of the children 
of the Church than did the persecution of the 
Koman Emperors. This second storm found 
them unprepared, engrossed with earth and its 
riches, and it but increased the evil. Practical 
religion became rarer amongst the masses, and 
both as cause and effect, the Blessed Eucharist 
was neglected. 

The Church wept over this sad state of 
things, and did all in her power to remedy it; 
first, by prescribing fixed times, at which it 
would be obligatory for the faithful to receive 
Holy Communion ; secondly, by establishing a 
sacred rite which might supply its place, as far 
as any earthly thing can supply the place of 



BLESSED FOOD. 183 

Jesus Christ, the Incarnate God. The times 
first fixed were Christmas, Easter and Pente- 
cost, but this seemed too often to the rough 
barons of the Middle Ages, and Mother Church, 
with the spirit of patient condescension which 
she had inherited from her Lord and Spouse 
limited the strict ecclesiastial obligation to one 
day and its accompanying period, Easter. 

The rite which she instituted was that of the 
Eulogies, They who assisted at Mass but did 
not communicate, received a portion of blessed 
bread, to remind them that they ought to hun- 
ger after the true Bread which comes down 
from heaven, of which, if any one shall eat, he 
shall live forever. The rite is meant to typify- 
also the union of belief and love which should 
exist among all the faithful, members of the 
same mystic body, participators of the same 
Sacred Victim which the Eulogy represents. 
Cardinal Bona cites authorities for the existence 
of this custom in the 4th century. 

The Eulogies were applied to many of the 
uses which had, at earlier periods, been restricted 
to the Blessed Eucharist. Bishops and par- 
ticular churches sent them to one another in 
token of communion, whereas the Holy Sacra- 



184 BLESSED FOOD. 

ment Itself had been used, not always without 
danger of accident, for the same purpose. The 
sending of wedding cake to absent friends is an 
analogous custom. Travelers took an Eulogy 
with them as a heavenly safeguard against the 
spiritual and bodily dangers of the journey. 
The Blessed Eucharist used, at times, to be 
carried in like manner. St. Ambrose relates 
of his own brother, Satyrus, that being on a 
voyage and in imminent danger of shipwreck, 
he implored the Body of Christ from some bap- 
tized fellow passengers. Satyrus himself had 
not yet received the Sacrament of regeneration, 
being only a catechumen. He obtained his 
request: the Precious Gift was given to him 
wrapped in a scarf, which he attached to his 
neck. He plunged boldly into the sea, trusting 
to Him for protection Who had supported the 
sinking Peter on the waves of Genesareth. He 
reached the shore in safety. 

Another view may be taken of the Eulogies; 
they may be considered remnants of the ancient 
Agapce or love-feasts. These were banquets in 
memory of the. Paschal Supper of which our 
Blessed Lord partook, before instituting the 
Sacrament of His Body and Blood. They were 



BLESSED FOOD. 185 

celebrated in the churches and on the tombs of 
the Martyrs. All the faithful joined in them 
and gave one another the kiss of peace. During 
the first century and a part of the second the 
Agapae preceded communion. Tertullian in- 
forms us that, in his time, many of the faithful 
thought it more reverent to receive the Blessed 
Eucharist fasting. The third Council of Car- 
thage, held in 397, made this practice obHga- 
tory, except on Holy Thursday, on which day, 
holy communion was received in the evening 
and after the Agapae. This was done in order 
to commemorate more vividly the Institution 
of the Blessed Sacrament. 

Abuses soon crept into the celebration of the 
love-feasts. St. Paul complained of them and 
severely rebuked the Corinthians (1 Cor. xi.) 
for the excesses and profanation of which they 
had been guilty. The disorder had arisen to 
such a height in the fourth century that the 
Church was obliged to interfere and denounce 
the Agapae. They were not surpressed however 
without great difficulty. 

The blessing and distribution of bread, dur- 
ing the sacrifice of the Mass, still prevails in 

France and Canada. The families of the parish 

16 



186 BLESSED FOOD. 

take turns in furnishing the loaves to be blessed 
at the High Mass. The bread is taken to the 
communion rail during the offertory. On great 
festivals it is profusely adorned with flowers 
and little banners. The celebrant, attended by 
two acolythes, blesses the bread, and, in some 
places, presents a cross to be kissed by the fam- 
ily furnishing the Eulogy. The loaf is cut in- 
to small pieces, after it has been blessed, and 
distributed to the congregation by an attendant 
of the sanctuary. The recipient of the blessed 
bread makes the sign of the cross, and is at 
liberty to eat his piece either in Church or at 
home. Those who who were not at the High 
Mass receive a portion from their neighbors 
who had the happiness of assisting at the 
sacred function. 

Good old French mothers teach their children 
to say the following little prayer before eating 
the Eulogy : 

" Pain b6nit ! je te prend ; 

Si la mort me suprend 

Sers moi de Saint Sacrement." 

"Blessed Bread! I take thee: if death should surprise me, 
supply the place of the Blessed Sacrament." 



BLESSED FOOD. 187 

The family that gives the bread on one Sun- 
day, reserves a small loaf to send to that family 
whose turn it is to make the offering on the 
next week. 

The above interesting details have been fur- 
nished by a Reverend French friend who has 
seen and participated in the ceremonies he 
describes. From a written account which he 
drew up, at our request, of several customs of 
his country, we make the following extracts, 
for which, we are sure, he and our readers will 
pardon us. 

1st. Little wooden crosses of about six inches 
in length are blessed on the 3d of May, the 
Feast of the Invention of the Cross. Each 
farmer provides himself with as many such 
crosses as he possesses different pieces of land 
or different productions. There must be a cross 
for the vineyard, another for the wheat-field, 
and for each field in like manner. These crosses 
are fixed with great devotion in their respective 
places, and by this act of piety the husbandman 
hopes to draw down the blessing of heaven on 
his harvest. 

2nd. Every good Catholic farmer has his seed 
blessed before committing it to the ground. 



188 BLESSED FOOD. 

This benediction takes place on a Sunday in 
September. 

3d. The fields are blessed on the Rogation 
days, that is. the three days immediately pre- 
ceding Ascension Thursday. Several large 
crosses ornamented with hangings, pictures and 
flowers are erected at the cross-roads and in 
different villages. A holy procession, bearing 
crosses and banners, and headed by the Pastor, 
starts early in the morning. Every family 
sends its representative to the procession in 
order to get a share in the blessing. The 
Litany of the Saints and the Penitential 
Psalms are sung during the march. From the 
way-side crosses the Priest solemnly blesses the 
fields and dwellings of the neighboring coun- 
try. 

The custom of blessing lambs at Easter is 
very ancient. God commanded the Jews to eat 
a lamb in memory of their deliverance from 
Egyptian bondage. With greater reason may 
Christians feast on the Paschal Lamb in com- 
memoration of their true Pasch, Christ Jesus, 
and of their passage through the Red Sea of 
His Precious Blood, from death to life, from sin 
to grace and hopes of heaven. 



BLESSED FOOD. 189 

Eggs too are blessed at the Easter time, be- 
cause they are emblematic of the Kesurrection. 
Just as from the egg a little creature issues 

forth to life, so from the silent tomb, the prison 
house of death, our Saviour sprang to immortal 
life and glory. 



XVL 

THE EPISCOPAL ORNAMENTS. 

An innate sense of propriety and reverence 
prompts us to exchange our ordinary dress for 
one more costly when about to appear in the 
presence of the great and noble. Custom or 
written regulations may prescribe the material, 
the color and the shape of the dress to be worn 
by those who seek an interview v/ith royal or 
imperial majesty, but that custom and those 
regulations are alike based on the dictates of 
natural good sense, and of reverence for law- 
fully constituted authority. All power is from 
God, and therefore he who slights that power 
by refusing to show it those exterior marks of 
honor to which nature and the practice of his 
fellowmen impel him, slights and insults Him 
from whom that power comes. 
190 



THE EPISCOPAL ORNAMENTS. 191 

The use, in religious functions, of vestments 
more costly than those of every day life, and 
differing from them in shape and color, is an 
application of the same principle. If an earth- 
ly potentate may justly require that his attend- 
ants should manifest the respect due to his 
exalted rank by the cleanliness and richness 
of their garb, may not God, the King of kings 
and the Lord of lords, exact the same from the 
ministers of his sanctuary ? If silk and ermine 
and costly stuffs of many a precious dye are in 
place on the person of an earl, or count or duke 
when waiting on his prince, do they cease to 
be becoming on the Bishop of the Most High 
God when celebrating the tremendous Mystery 
of the Mass? If the ruby, the sapphire, and 
the diamond may gleam on the coronet of kings, 
is the mitre of the Lord's anointed less worthy 
of the honor ? 

The priest of Jupiter and the priest of Jeho- 
vah were clad in appropriate dress when per- 
forming the solemn acts of religious worship. 
The priest of Jesus Christ has also a garb indi- 
cating his sacred order, symbolizing the virtues 
which belong to it and befitting the solemnity 



192 THE EPISCOPAL ORNAMENTS. 

of the functions which he exercises. But it 
does not therefore follow that the ornaments of 
the Christian priesthood are mere servile copies 
of the Jewish, or those in turn of the Pagan 
priestly dress. The use of sacred vestments, 
like the offering of sacrifice, is common to all 
forms of religion, no matter how perverted, and 
hence must spring from a cause common to all, 
which can be no other than an intellectual per- 
ception of the necessity of religion and a religious 
sentiment in the heart given to every soul at 
the moment of creation, by its All-wise Maker. 
That religious instinct impels man to worship 
his Creator with both parts of his being, soul 
and body, thus to acknowledge God's sovereign 
dominion over him. Faith, hope and charity 
are the worship of the soul, the performing of 
sacred ceremonies and the use of vestments are 
the worship of the body, and the reception of 
the sacraments, vocal prayer and the spiritual 
and corporal works of mercy combine both kinds 
of worship. 

There are many and striking analogies be- 
tween the vestments of the Jewish and Chris- 
tian priesthood. These are owing to the 



THE EPISCOPAL ORNAMENTS. 193 

typical nature of the Old Law. St. Paul tells 
us (chap. X. Ep. to Hebrews) that the law had 
only a shadow of the good things to come. 
Jesus Christ and His grace were the realities 
which it prefigured, and its ceremonies were 
ordained only in reference to the ceremonies of 
the Christian dispensation. The latter were 
first in the order of the divine decrees; other- 
wise the shadow would excel the substance — 
the figure, the reality. Whenever, then, we 
refer to any Jewish rite or ceremony as illus- 
trative of the rites of the Catholic Church, we 
regard it merely as a symbol or type, not as an 
oriocinal. 

Each of the sacred orders has its ajDpropriate 
dress. The amice, alb, cincture and maniple 
are common to all. The tunic belongs to the 
subdeaconship ; the transverse stole and dal- 
matic to the deacon ship ; the stole crossed over 
the breast and the chasuble to the priesthood.* 
The sandals, stockings, gloves, gremial, pectoral 
cross, ring, crosier and mitre belong to Bishops, 
and are therefore called the episcopal ornaiiients. 



* The Bishop also wears the chasuble and stole; the latter, 
however, he never crosses on his breast, but lets it hang 
straight. 

17 



104 TUE EPISCOPAL ORNAMENTS. 

The pallium and the processional cross are the 
insignia of archiepiscopal dignity. 



Tlve Sandals, 

The sandal was originally a wooden sole 
fastened to the foot with thongs. In course of 
time the toes were covered with a piece of 
leather, and then the whole upper part of the 
foot : thus the sandal became a slipper. Under 
the Roman emperors, the sandals of the nobil- 
ity were remarkable for the richness of their 
material and embroidery. At first, the Church, 
through reverence for the Sacred Mysteries, 
commanded all her ministers to wear sandals 
or slippers when officiating at the altar, but for 
many centuries their use has been confined to 
Bishops. 

The sandals of the early Anglo-Saxon Bish- 
ops were made of leather, beautifully stained, 
and perforated on the upper part with holes, 
wrought into various designs, through which 
the embroidered stocking appeared in fine 
contrast with the leather of the sandal. Hilde- 
bert, an ecclesiastical writer of the eleventh 



THE EPISCOPAL ORNAMENTS. 195 

century, thus explains the mystical meaning 
of these apertures or "windows" in the san- 
dals : " The upper part is perforated, in order 
that the foot may be partially covered and 
partially uncovered, to teach the preacher of 
the Gospel that he must not indiscreetly reveal 
to all nor conceal from all the mysteries of that 
Gospel." Some are so weak in faith as to need, 
like the Corinthians, to be fed with milk, while 
others can bear the strong, solid food of Chris- 
tian doctrine* 

In the thirteenth and fourteenth century, 
the leathern sandal gave place to one of silk, 
wrought with gold or silver needle-work, and 
adorned with precious stones. It had no 
apertures on top. In England the color of 
the sandal was scarlet ; elsewhere, of black or 
red. 

The sandals are the emblems of an apostolic 
missionary, of one who travels from country to 
country to preach the Gospel of Christ. The 
Bishop fulfills the duties of a missionary in the 
visitation of his diocese. When our Lord sent 
out the twelve Apostles two by two. He com- 
manded them to he shod tcith sandals (St. Mark 
vi. 9). The embroidery of the sandal and 



196 THE EPISCOPAL ORNAMENTS. 

stockings represents the beauty of the Gospel : 
luyw heautlful are tlie feet of those that preach the 
gospel of 'peace^ of them that bring good tidings 
of good things. 

I 
I 

The StocJdngs ' 

Became part of the episcopal dress at the end 
of the tenth century. They are of red or 
white, according to the color of the vestments 
of the day, and are always worn by the Bishop 
when he solemnly pontificates, except in Re- 
quiem Masses. 

The Gloves, 

As part of the sacred dress, seem to have 
been introduced in the seventh century. At 
first they were used by both priests and Bishops, 
but in the ninth century they were restricted 
to the latter. They were made of very rich 
material, and were encrusted with gold and 
precious stones. A cross was wrought on the 
back of them. Remains of ancient sculpture 
and painting prove that the episcopal glove 
gometimes extended above the wrist. 



THE EPISCOPAL ORNAMENTS. 197 

When Jacob wished to obtain the benedic- 
tion of his father Isaac, in place of his brother 
Esau, he covered his hands with the skin of a 
kid, in order that they might resemble the 
hairy hands of Esau, and then went into the 
presence of his father. The Bishop clothes his 
hands with the blessed gloves, as with the mer- 
its of Jesus Christ, and then goes to the sacred 
altar to impetrate from the Eternal Father a 
benediction for himself and his people. This 
mystic signification of the gloves is clearly ex- 
pressed in the prayer which the consecrating 
Bishop says when drawing them on the hands 
of the newly-consecrated prelate: "Clothe, O 
Lord! the hands of this Thy minister with the 
cleanliness of the New Man who descended 
from heaven, that, as Jacob, thy beloved, having 
his hands clothed with the skins of kids, ob- 
tained the paternal benediction, by offering food 
and a most agreeable drink to his father; so 
may he, by offering with his hands the victim 
of salvation, obtain the benediction of Thy 
grace, through our Lord Jesus Christ, Thy Son, 
who, in the likeness of sinful flesh, offered 
Himself to Thee for us." 



198 THE EPISCOPAL ORNAMENTS. 



Tlie Gremial 

Is a veil of silk or other precious stuff extended 
on the lap of the Bishop, when seated during 
Pontifical High Mass, to prevent the chasuble 
from being soiled by the moisture of the hands, 
or by the missal which the acolytes hold before 
the prelate. The name of this ornament is 
derived from the Latin word gremium, which 
signifies the lap. The priest, deacon and sub- 
deacon used it in former times, but now it 
is exclusively an episcopal ornament. How- 
ever, "the Dominican friars," says Dr. Rock, 
in his book entitled The Church of Our Fathers, 
" if they do not yet, did, till a very late period, 
keep up the use of linen lap-cloths for the 
celebrant and his two ministers at High Mass." 



The Pectoi'al Cross. 

The devout children of the Church, both 
clergy and laity, wore, from the earliest times, 
a cross or crucifix as a memorial of Christ's 
Passion, and of the Christian's obligation of 



THE EPISCOPAL ORNAMENTS. 199 

carrying the cross. It was not until the 13th 
century that a cross of silver or gold worn ou 
the breast became a mark of the Episcopal 
character. It reminds the prelate that his 
sublime and most holy state is one of suffering, 
and that as he sits on the throne of Christ, he 
must needs be ready, to drink the chalice of 
Christ's Passion. The cross may glitter with 
gold and gems, but still it remains a cross. 
Relics of the martyrs are sometimes enclosed 
in its cavity, to show that the Bishop is prepared 
to bear witness by his blood, his teaching and 
his virtues to the truths of the Holy Faith. 

Though full of holy mystic meanings, the 
pectoral cross is not one of those ornaments 
which are solemnly given in the ceremony of 
consecration. The Prelate elect takes it him- 
self when vesting for mass, thus expressing 
that the only thing he desires is the cross of 
Jesus Christ. 

The Ring. 

Macrobius, a Latin writer of the 5th century, 
informs us that the ancients used the ring not 
as an ornament, but as a seal. Several passages 



200 THE EPISCOPAL ORNAMENTS. 

of scripture illustrate this remark. Jezahel 
wrote letters in AchaUa name and sealed them with 
his ring (3 Kings, xxi. 8.) And King Assiierua 
answered * * * * lorite ye therefoi-e to the Jews, aa 
it pleaseth you, in the King's name^ and seal the 
letters with my ring (Esther viii. 8.) They 
brought Daniel and cast him into the den of the 
Lions * * * * And a stone teas brought and laid 
iipo7i the mouth of the den, ichich tlve hing sealed 
loith his own rhig, and vnth the ring of his nobles, 
(Daniel vi. 17.) As only the nobles were 
accustomed to use seals, the ring became an 
emblem of dignity and authority. And as a 
seal serves to hide and keep secret what is 
contained under it, the ring symbolizes also 
secrecy and fidelity. From this last signification 
it came to be used as the pledge of tw^o most 
sacred contracts — of the marriage between 
husband and wife, and between the bishop and 
his church. 

The Episcopal ring is blessed, in the cere- 
mony of the consecration, and placed, by the 
consecrating Bishop, on the third finger of the 
right hand of the new prelate, with these 
words : " Receive the ring, the seal of fidelity ; 
that being adorned with inviolate fidelity, thou 



THE EPISCOPAL ORNAMENTS. 201 

mayst without stain guard the spouse of God, 
that is, the Holy Church." 

Dr. Kock, speaking of the Episcopal ring of 
the English Bishops, when England had the 
happiness of being Catholic, says : " This ring 
was larger, and in conformity with the style of 
those times, wrought more heavy than the 
same kind of ecclesiastical ornament is in our 
day. Though commonly having for its stone a 
sapphire, it not unfrequently bore a deep broad 
emerald, or a ruby ; and, to keep it in its right 
place, another plain but smaller ring was put 
upon the finger just above it." 



The Tunic and Dalmatic 

Are, as we have said, the peculiar ornaments 
of the subdeaconship and deaconship, yet the 
Bishop wears them, made of satin of the color 
of the day, under his chasuble, when he pon- 
tificates. It is fitting that he who has the 
plenitude of the sacrament of Holy Orders and 
the power of conferring it should be clothed 
with all the vestments of each of its sacred 
grades. 



202 THE EPISCOPAL ORNAMENTS. 



The Crosier, 

As an ensign of Episcopal authority, has been 
in use since the 6th or 7th century. St. Isi- 
dore of Seville, a Spanish Bishop, who died in 
636, says in his book De Eccl. Officiis, that a 
staff is given to the newly consecrated prelate 
as a sign that he is to rule and correct his 
people, and bear with the infirmities of the 
weak. 

The form of the Crosier has been different at 
different epochs. Sometimes it was merely a 
straight rod surmounted by a transverse piece 
so as to form a cross ; hence its name. Crosier, 
' Some of the Anglo-Saxon Bishops used one 
capped by a ball. " From those found in the 
ninth century hanging over the graves of 
bishops, then long since dead, it would seem 
that they were bent at the top." 

Wood of the most costly kind was one of the 
first materials used for the pastoral staff". But 
soon the gold and the silver mines were laid 
under contribution, and the Crosier of the 
Bishop began to vie in value and beauty with 
the sceptre of the King. In the 12th century 



THE EPISCOPAL ORNAMENTS. 203 

the Crosier was composed of different materials. 
The stem was of wood, surmounted bj a ball, 
to which an ivory crook was attached. Around 
the crook was the inscription, "m tJiy anger 
tliou slialt rememher mercy ;' on the ball was the 
word man, reminding the pontiff that he was 
man, and that he ruled not over angels, but 
frail men. The foot of the Crosier, made of 
iron, bore the motto spare. 

The Pope does not carry the Crosier. Inno- 
cent III., who reigned in the beginning of the 
13th century, says expressly, {De Sacro Altaris 
Mysteriis, lib. i., cap. 2, xi.,) that the Roman 
Pontiff does not use the pastoral staff. One 
account thus explains this fact : St. Peter sent 
his staff to Eucher, first Bishop of Treves, who 
kept it with great reverence in his Episcopal 
city. His successor, Materrus, having been 
raised from the dead by the miraculous power 
of the Apostle's crook, the good people of 
Treves resolved never to give up so precious a 
relic, and thus blessed Peter was deprived of 
his pastoral staff. 

A wand or rod has always been considered 
the emblem of power and jurisdiction ; in the 
hand of a monarch, it is called a sceptre, in 



204 THE EPISCOPAL ORNAMENTS. 

that of a bishop, a crosier. The Lord will send 
forth thy power out of Slon (Ps. cix.) Thou 
shall rule them with a rod of iron (Ps. ii.) The 
sceptre of thy kingdom is a sceptre of uprighbiess 
(Ps. xliv.) 

The Bishop's sceptre is bent like the shep- 
herd's crooky to indicate that his rule is one of 
mildness and love. Feed my sheep, feed my 
lambs, was our Lord's charge to St. Peter, a 
charge in which all the Bishops of the Church 
participate, in subordination to the Chief Pas- 
tor, the Sovereign Pontiff; and for this reason 
they receive the crosier, in the ceremony of 
their consecration, as an emblem of the pastoral 
charge. "Receive," says the consecrating pre- 
late, "the staff of the pastoral office, that thou 
mayest be piously severe in the correction of 
vice, exercising judgment without wrath, wooing 
the affections of those who hear thee to cherish 
virtue, not abandoning a just severity in mild- 
ness." 

The mystic meanings of the crosier are con- 
tained in the following Latin verses : 

In baculi forma, praesul, datur haec tibi norma: 
Attrahe per prinmm, medio rege, punge per imum. 
Attrahe peccantes, age justos, punge vagantes ; 
Attrahe, sustenta, stimula, vaga, morbida, lenta. 



THE EPISCOPAL OENAMENTS. 205 

The form of thy staff, holy prelate, is replete 
with mystical meaning. The middle is sign of 
thy rule, the foot of holy correction. With 
the crook on the top, thou sweetly drawest 
souls unto virtue. Attract all poor sinners, 
strike the vagrant, urge on the just to perfec- 
tion. Lure the wanderer, be a prop to the 
weak and a spear to the slow-paced. 

The Mitre, 

The 28th chapter of Exodus enumerates the 
mitre among the ornaments which God com- 
manded to be prepared for Aaron and his sons, 
and which were to be used by all their succes- 
sors in the Jewish priesthood. It is hard to 
determine the precise period of the introduction 
of the mitre, in the Christian Church, as one 
of the insignia of episcopal or abbatial rank. 
Some have asserted that the Bishops of the 
first centuries wore no head dress at all, during 
the celebration of the sacred mysteries ; or, if 
they did, that it was one common to them with 
the rest of the clergy. The 4 th Council of 
Toledo, held in the 7th century, when mention- 
ing the Episcopal ornaments, says nothing of 



206 THE EPISCOPAL ORNAMENTS. 

the mitre. Nor is any trace found of it in the 
ancient rituals or the works of those who wrote 
on the rites and ceremonies of the church. 

The account which Dr. Rock gives of the 
origin and variation in shape and color of the 
mitre, in his valuable work on ecclesiastical 
antiquities, to which we have frequently re- 
ferred, is connected and detailed and substanti- 
ated by copious quotations from ancient writers, 
and therefore we shall take it as our guide in 
our remarks on the mitre. 
^ A circlet or crown of gold and silver was the 
first ornament which adorned the head of the 
Bishop. This gave way to a white kerchief of 
fine linen, fitting close around the temples, and 
tied by a ribbon, the ends of which fell loose 
about the shoulders. In the eleventh century 
this head dress assumed a horned or peaked ap- 
pearance just above the ears of the prelate; in 
shape, however, it continued to be for some 
time broad and low. The present elevation of 
the mitre, terminating in two peaks, began to 
prevail from the thirteenth century. 

The ribbon that had been used to tie the 
linen kerchief became a mere ornament, giving 
rise to the flaps or pendants of the mitre. As 



THE EPISCOPAL ORNAMENTS. 207 

around the hem of the Jewish High Priest's 
tunic there were seventy-two golden bells, in 
like manner several little bells of precious metal 
sometimes hung from the pendants of the mitre. 
They reminded the Pontiff that as their sweet 
chiming was music in the ears, so the harmony 
of his virtues ought to be music in the hearts 
of his people. 

The mitre seems to have been at first made 
of linen- Afterwards the richest silks were 
used, and sometimes it was entirely composed 
of thin plates of gold or silver. The following 
beautiful paragraph from The Church of Our 
Fathers shows us what was the splendor of the 
mitre in the days of Catholic England's glory : 
" Every art was bid to come and lend its beauty 
to this sacred diadem : the embroideress was its 
willing handmaid and her needle storied it with 
saints ; the enameller, after his craft, strewed 
it over with everlasting flowers and devices, 
and wreathed it about with bands of beautiful 
design in living and unfading colors ; the jew- 
eller sprinkled it with light from every precious 
stone — with the soft green rays of the emerald — 
with the fire of the burning ruby — the blue 
beams of the sky-lit sapphire and the golden 



208 THE EPISCOPAL ORNAMENTS. 

twinklings of the yellow topaz. Nor was the 
worker in the costly metals behind the rest with 
the cunning of his elegant mystery : when he 
was asked to fashion a rich mitre out of gold or 
silver, he wrought these two thin, though solid, 
sheets of which it was to be made up, out of 
the precious metal in such a way, that they not 
only opened and shut with the utmost readiness 
by means of gimmels or hinges, light, though 
strong, in their frame and nicely adjusted at the 
sides, but so bent themselves upon the weai^er's 
venerable brow, as to sit with ease upon it : two 
other gimmels held loosely, though securely, 
the lappets as they swung behind, and all up 
the edges of the mitre, this master of his art 
taught to creep a purfling of crockets in silver, 
the thin, leaf-like, veined appearance of vfhich, 
cut as they w^ere, and tooled to look most light 
and sharp and crispy, would be gazed on now 
as a marvel — a very miracle of handicraft." 

As the crosier is the Bishop's sceptre, so the 
mitre is his crown. It is the helmet of salvation 
mentioned by St. Paul (Eph. vi.,) and therefore 
the consecrating Bishop and his assistants say, 
in the ceremony of its conferring : " We place, 
Lord ! upon the head of this Thy prelate and 



THE EPISCOPAL ORNAMENTS. 209 

combatant the helmet of protection and salva- 
tion." The two horns or peaks of the mitre 
are emblems of the rays of glory which flashed 
from the countenance of Moses when he de- 
scended from Sinai, after his forty days' con- 
verse with God. They are also typical of the 
two Testaments, those treasures of sacred 
science which are contained in the mind, on 
the lips and in the heart of the Lord's anointed. 

The Bishop has several mitres, more or less 
ornate, which he uses according to the greater 
or less solemnity of the functions which he per- 
forms. The Oriental Bishops do not wear the 
mitre. 

The ornaments which we have just described 
are sometimes worn by those who are inferior 
to a Bishop in ecclesiastical dignity. Mitred 
Abbots* when solemnly officiating are arrayed 
in full pontifical dress. They cannot, however, 



* Abbot; is a Syriac word, meaning fatlier. Canon Law dis- 
tinguishes different kinds of Abbots. The name is ordinarily 
applied to the ruler of a Religious Order or Monastery. There 
are two mitred Abbots in the United States, the Right Rev. 
Father Eutropioas of the Trappist Monastery of Gethseraani, 
Ky., and Right Rev. Boniface Wimmer of the Benedictine 
Monastery of St. Vincent, Latrobe, Pa. 

18 



210 THE EPISCOPAL ORNAMENTS. 

use the precious or glorious mitre, unless by 
express privilege of the Holy See, and a white 
veil ought to be attached to their joastoral staff. 
As the veil on the head of the woman is a sign 
of modesty and of her subjection to man, so this 
veil denotes the inferiority of the office of an 
Abbot to that of a Bishop. And as a cloth or 
kerchief is used to remove perspiration from 
the countenance, so, appended to the Abbot's 
crozier, it signifies that his task is one of labor 
and fatigue. Abbots exempt from episcopal 
jurisdiction may lay aside this veil. When 
celebrating Mass privately they are in no way 
distinguished from a simple priest.* 

According to the learned Mabillon, Egelsinus, 
Abbot of the Monastery of St. Augustine, near 
Canterbury, England, was the first mitred Ab- 
bot of whom we have an authentic record. 
The mitre was granted to him by Pope Alex- 
ander 11. , who reigned from 1061 to 1073. 



* According to the 8th section of a decree of the Congrega- 
tion of Rites, approved by Alexander VII., in 1659, Abbots can 
not use the pastoral staff, or other pontifical insignia, outside of 
the church or churches subject to their jurisdiction, even with 
the permission of the Bishop of the place. — Bibliotheca FeV' 
raris. 



THE EPISCOPAL ORNAMENTS. 211 

The Cardinals of the Roman Church, al- 
though not BishopSj wore the mitre from the 
time of St. Leo IX. (1049-1055) until the first 
general Council of Lyons in 1244, when Pope In- 
nocent ly. gave them the red hat, to remind 
them that they should be ready to suffer mar- 
tyrdom for the Church. 

In some places it was customary for the cele- 
brant and the two assisting sacred ministers to 
wear mitres. We have found one author as- 
serting that consecrated virgins wore the mitre 
in the fourth century. 

Nor is the use of the ring confined to the 
episcopal dignity. It is one of the insignia of 
the doctorate, and it is also placed on one of the 
fingers of the nun when she solemnly takes the 
veil. 

We cannot more fittingly conclude this ac- 
count of the episcopal ornaments than with the 
prayer of the Roman Pontifical : " And there- 
fore we beseech Thee, Lord! to bestow upon 
this Thy servant whom Thou hast chosen for 
the ministry of the High Priesthood this grace 
— that whatsoever the vestments of the Old 
Law signified, in the shining of gold, the spark- 
ling of gems and in the variety of diversified 



212 THE EPISCOPAL ORNAMENTS. 

works, may beam forth in his Hfe and actions. 
Fill up in Thy Priest the plenitude of Thy 
ministry, and with the dew of Thy heavenly 
ointment sanctify him, clad with the ornaments 
of perfect glory." 



XV 

THE PALLIUM. 

The Pallium is a sacred band of white wool, 
adorned with crosses, and worn over the shoulders, 
so as to hang down a little in front and behind. 
The extremities consist of thin sheets of lead cased 
in black silk. 

There is a diversity of opinion amongst ecclesi- 
astical antiqurians concerning the origin of the 
Pallium. Some have held that it was an ornament 
of imperial dignity, but that the Christian emperors 
granted to the princes of the ecclesiastical hierarchy 
the privilege of wearing it. Others deduce it from 
the Ephod or the Rational of the Jewish high 
priest, and a third party would ascribe its origin to 
a design of the church to give to her chief pastors 
a sacred vestment which would, by its mystic or 



214 THE PALLIUM. 

symbolic meanings, perpetually remind tliem of their 
duties. The learned Vespasiani, late professor of 
ecclesiastical history in the college of the Propa- 
ganda, Rome, and at present bishop of one of the 
sees of Italy, published an essay, last year, in 
support of the following proposition : " The true 
signification of the Apostolical Pallium, seems to 
be the representation of the Pallium or outer 
garment of Sb. Peter. The Romm Pontiffs wear 
it as a mark that they hold the place of Peter. 
It is granted to other prelates as a sign that their 
authority emanates from the Pope, the representa- 
tive of St. Peter, the Prince of the Apostles." 

The arguments of the learned professor are 
numerous and solid, and invest his opinion with 
the highest degree of probability, that, perhaps, 
can ever be attained on the subject. We present 
a brief analysis of them to our readers. 

The Pallium or liimation was to the Greeks and 
Orientals what the toga was to the Romans. It 
was a square piece of cloth worn over the shoulders, 
flowing down behind, and covering the breast and 
arms of the wearer more or less, at his pleasure. 

The Jews also used the Pallium. "Speak to 
the children of Israel, and thou shalt tell them, to 
make to themselves fringes in the corners of their 



THE PALLIUM. 215 

garments, putting in them ribbons of blue : that 
when they shall see them, they may remember all 
the commandments of the Lord, and not follow 
their own thoughts and eyes going astray after 
divers things." (Num., xv. 38.) 

The word garments in this passage is ixdliorum 
in Latin, and hiniation in Greek. St. Luke tells 
us of the woman having the issue of blood, " that 
she touched the hem of Christ's garment and was 
cured." Again the Greek text has hiniation for 
garment. 

The ancient christians had no peculiar form of 
dress, but adopted that which was worn at the 
time ; hence they, too, used the Pallium. More- 
over it is considered highly probable by Liturgists 
that their sacred vestments were not different in 
form, but only in greater neatness, from their ordi- 
nary dress. Who, for instance, doubts that the 
subdiaconal tunic and the diaconal dalmatic origi- 
nated from garments of that name worn as articles 
of civil dress in the times of the Roman emperors ? 
In this way the Pallium became an article of eccle- 
siastical attire, in fact, the chief one because it held 
the most important ^nd dignified place among the 
articles of civil dress. Nor was it devoid of sacred 
significations. It was a memorial of the command- 



216 THE PALLIUM. 

ments of God and continence from worldly de- 
sires : this is a natural consequence of the text of 
Deuteronomy already quoted. Christ and the 
Apostles wore the Pallium and thereby sanctified 
it. 

The present form of the Pallium is, of course 
much different from what it was anciently. Times 
and places have changed it just as they have 
changed the form of the other sacred vestments. 

Sacred Scripture and Church History clearly 
prove the fact that the Pallium, or outer garment, 
of saintly personages was reverently preserved and 
sometimes worn by others. To assume the Pallium 
of another was to imbibe his spirit and profess to 
be his disciple. Hence among the Romans the 
phrase ex toga ad^palUum transire meant to devote 
oneself to the study of Greek philosophy ; for the 
Pallium was one of the distinctive articles of dress 
of the learned men of Greece. "And the Lord 
said to him (Elias) : " Eliseus the son of Japhat, 
of Abelmeula, thou shalt anoint to be prophet in 
thy room. . . . And Elias departing from 
thence found Eliseus, and when Elias came up to 
him, he cast his mantle upon him." (III. Kings, 
xix. 16, 19.) The corresponding word for mantle 
in the Latin Vulgate is ^pallium. When Elias was 



THE PALLIUM. 217 

taken up in a chariot of fire, he dropped his Pal- 
lium, as a legacy to his faithful disciple, and im- 
mediately Eliseus used it as the instrument of his 
miraculous powers. He struck the waters of the 
Jordan with the sacred garment, and they were 
divided, and the prophet passed over dry shod. 

St. Jerome relates, in his life of St. Paul the 
Egyptian Hermit, that the venerable man begged 
from St. Anthony the mantle or Pallium which St. 
Athanasius, the Patriarch of Alexandria, had 
given him ; St. Paul did it in order that it might 
serve as a winding sheet for his burial. Thus he 
professed that he hold the same faith as Athana- 
sius, the intrepid champion of the Divinity of the 
Eternal Word against the impious Arians. 

Nicetes the Paphlagonian says that St. Igna- 
tius of Constantinople was clothed by his domestics 
with the sacred vestments of the patriarchal dignity; 
then, with the greatest reverence, they placed on 
his shoulders the humeral veil of St. James the 
brother of our Lord. The same author relates that 
the garment in question had been sent from Jeru- 
salem, and that the Patriarch Ignatius regarded it 
with as much veneration as if he had seen it on the 
shoulders of the Apostle James. He ordered that 

it should be buried with him. 

19 



218 THE PALLIUM. 

The testimony of the Deacon Liberatus,* in his 
history of the Nestorians and Eutychians, is still 
more striking; speaking of the consecration of 
Theodosius as Patriarch of Alexandria, after the 
death of Timothy, he says : " It is customary at 
Alexandria that he who succeeds a deceased bishop 
should keep watch over the corpse, and having 
applied the right hand of the dead prelate to his 
own head, should proceed to bury the body, having 
taken from it and placed round his own neck the 
Pallium of the Blessed Mark. Then he may legi- 
timately occupy the episcopal throne." St. Mark, 
the Evangelist was the founder of the Church of 
Alexandria and its first bishop. His successors 
wore his Pallium to testify that they represented 
him, and had their succession of orders and juris- 
diction from him. 

Two passages, of similar import with the preced- 
ing, the one taken from a sermon on the Epiphany 
ascribed to Eusebius of Csesarea, the other from a 
sermon on the sacredotal vestments which bears 
the name of St. Maximus, make Vespasiani's argu- 
ment still stronger. 

Eusebius writes thus : " Nothing is more ancient 

* Liberatus was a Latin writer of the 6th century. 



THE PALLIUM. 219 

than that priestly garment of our chief Pontiff 
which has succeeded the Ephod of the Old Testa- 
ment. Linus was first clad with it, in token of 
plenary power, and he it was who, according to 
ancient writers, gave it the name of Pallium and 
attached to it a typical meaning." 

St. Linus was the immediate successor of St. 
Peter. He was first clad with it, because he was 
the first that wore the Pallium of the Prince of the 
Apostles. That the vestment in question refers to 
Peter seems evident from the phrase in token of 
'plenary jpower, and he attached to it a typical 
meaning : in sigum plenissimoe jpotestatis — cui et 
typmn dedit. Linus possessed plenary power be- 
cause he was the successor of St. Peter. He at- 
tached a typical meaning to the Pallium, because 
on St. Peter it was an article of every day dress, on 
Linus it was a sacred vestment, typical of his apos- 
tolic succession. 

St. Maximus says : " Our Patriarchs are of 
opinion that the Pallium was instituted by Linus, 
the second Roman Pontiff, the successor of Peter ; 
and it is given to our prelates, filled with the spirit 
of God, as a peculiar mark of power." 

The sacred rites connected with the Pallium 
afford new proofs of its origin from the Pallium of 



220 THE PALLIUM. 

St. Peter. The phrase generally used by Arch- 
bishops in petitioning for this holy ornament, and 
by the Apostolic See in granting it, is Pallium de 
corj>ore Sancti Petri — the Pallium from the body 
of St. Peter. 

It is blessed on the tomb of the Prince of the 
Apostles, by the Sovereign Pontiffj after Vespers 
on the Feast of St. Peter's martyrdom (29th June), 
the happy day on which the Saint laid aside his 
earthly Pallium to receive a royal robe of glory in 
the kingdom of heaven. The hallowed Pallia are 
then put in a casket and left on the sacred tomb, 
to be taken thence, as the wants of the Patriarchs 
and Archbishops of the Church may require. 

It has been customary, from ancient times, for 
the Bishop of Ostia to consecrate the Pope (in case 
he should not have been a bishop before his eleva- 
tion to the Papacy) at the tomb of St. Peter in 
the Vatican Basilica. The new Pontiff takes his 
Pallium from the same holy shrine, thus represent- 
ing to the life what Liberatus relates of the Patri- 
archs of Alexandria, taking the Pallium of St. Mark 
from the body of their deceased predecessor. The 
Papacy never dies ; it is ever issuing forth phoenix- 
like, from the ashes of dead Pontiffs, going through 
a series of resurrections, the legitimate consequ- 



THE PALLIUM. 221 

ences and perpetual representations of Christ's 
Resurrection from the tomb. 

The learned author whom we have taken as our 
guide in what concerns the Pallium has numerous 
other arguments, drawn from ancient and modern 
rites connected with the sacred ornament, confirm- 
atory of his proposition. These we pass over, to 
come to points of more immediate interest. 

On the 21st of January, the Feast of the Virgin 
Saint Agnes, the religious inhabiting the convent 
bearing the Saint's name, in Rome, offer two spot- 
less white lambs, at the Agnus Dei of the Solemn 
Mass, celebrated in the Church of St. Agnes. 
After the Ite, Missa est, the little animals are 
placed on the altar, one at the side of the Gospel, 
the other at that of the Epistle, on cushions of 
white damask fringed with gold. The celebrant 
blesses them, and then a master of ceremonies of 
St. John Lateran, accompanied by a suite of officers, 
proceeds to the Vatican, and lays the lambs at the 
feet of the Pope, who gives them a second bene- 
diction. They are then confided to the care of the 
Nuns of the Blessed Sacrament, and at the proper 
season they are shorn and the wool is woven, by 
the religious, into Pallia. These insignia are placed 
on the tomb of St. Peter on the Vigil of his feast, 



222 THE PALLIUM. 

and are blessed the next day, as we have already 
described. 

The white wool is emblematic of the purity and 
innocence of life of the Prelates of the Church, the 
anointed wearers of the Pallium. The lambs, 
from the fleece of which it is made, remind them 
that they have charge over the lambs and sheep of 
Christ, the souls of men. They wear the Pallium 
over the shoulders that they may remember to 
imitate the Good Shepherd; that they may be faith- 
ful to go out into the deserts and thickets of the 
world in search of the strayed and thorn-entangled 
sheep, and bring them back on their shoulders to 
to the sheep fold. The Pallium is marked with six 
black crosses, to show that the chief pastorship is a 
weighty burden, a heavy cross : imposuisti homines 
super capita nostra. These crosses were originally 
red, but in the middle of the thirteenth century, 
the present color, black, was substituted. 

The Pope, because he is successor of St. Peter, 
and has universal jurisdiction over the whole 
Church, wear§ the Pallium at all times and in all 
places, over his other sacred vestments. Patri- 
archs, Primates and Archbishops have, too, the 
right of wearing the Pallium, but only in the limits 
of their province and on certain days, a list of 



THE PALLIUM. 223 

which is given in the Roman Pontifical. Some 
Bishops have the privilege of the Pallium, either 
because it has been granted to the See, which they 
occupy, or to themselves personally, as a mark 
of the peculiar favor and honor in which they are 
held by the Apostolic See. The dioceses of Ostia, 
in Italy, of Autun and Puy, in France, are exam- 
ples of privileged bishoprics. Amongst the acts of 
the Secret Consistory held by Pope Pius JX., in the 
palace of St. Michael-in-Bosco, Bologna, on the 3d 
of August, 1857, was a request for the Sacred 
Pallium for the Cathedral Church of Vul terra in 
Tuscany, thus privileged by a Bull of His Holiness, 
under date of the 1st of August, 1856. The 
occupant of that See, appointed in the same Con- 
sistory, is Monsignore Joseph Targioni. 

An Archbishop elect cannot take that title be- 
fore the reception of his Pallium ; and although 
already a Bishop, Canon Law suspends the exer- 
cise of many of his episcopal functions. He may, 
however, in that case, licitly request his suffragans 
to act for him. 

The privilege of wearing the Pallium is a per- 
sonal one, yet restricted, in its exercise, to a certain 
place. Pallium datur ^ersonce, sed contemjplatione 
loci. This axiom of the Glossa on Canon Law 



224 THB PALLIUM. 

explains the following disciplinary regulations re- 
garding the Pallium : 

An Archbishop cannot allow another prelate to 
use his Pallium. 

When he dies the Pallium must be buried with 
him. 

An Archbishop, translated to another Archi- 
episcopal See must get a second Pallium, because 
the first was granted for his first metropolitan 
church, contemplatione p^imce ecclesice. Yet he 
ought to keep his first Pallium. When he dies the 
second Pallium is put round his shoulders, and 
the other is laid under his head. 

An Archbishop who resigns his See, and is after- 
wards re-appointed to it, must apply for a new 
Pallium. 

If an Archbishop should, by any chance, lose 
his Pallium, he may exercise pontifical functions 
without it, but he must apply for another. 

A Pallium which has been granted but never 
given to a prelate, cannot be given to another. 
It is to be burned and the ashes thrown into the 
Sacrarium.* 

* The Sacrarium is a conduit from some part of the 
church, generally the Sacristry or Vestry, to the blessed 
ground on which tho church is built. 



APPENDIX. 



A. 
APPENDIX. 

When the article on Litanies appeared in the 
Catholic Telegraph; the position taken by the wri- 
ter was attacked on several different points by dif- 
ferent correspondents. It would be uninteresting 
to the general reader to insert the whole contro- 
versy, but truth requires that he should be inform- 
ed that such a controversy took place, and that 
some of the arguments urged by our adversaries 
were strong and pointed. The following remarks 
on the Roman Congregations and the binding 
power of their decisions, may not, in the present 
state of the case, be devoid of interest, and may 
help the reader to understand the point in contro- 
versy. 

The practical conclusion drawn in the article on 
Litanies was that no Litanies, except those of the 
Saints and of the Blessed Virgin, ought to be reci- 
ted in pubhc functions, but that others may be 
recited by the faithful in their private devotions. 
At the same time the author counseled, even in 
the latter case, the use of Litanies certainly ap- 
proved and indulgenced in preference to those not 
thus privileged. The conclusion to which one of 
the Telegraph's correspondents came is that other 
Litanies than the two mentioned may iwi be recited 



n APPENDIX. 

by the faithful, even in private. He agrees with 
the writer of the Sacramentals that their use in 
puhlic fundiom is forbidden by the Sacred Con- 
gregation of Rites, and then says that the writer 
in question has overlooked the fact that their pri- 
vate recitation is forbidden by the Congregation of 
the Index. 

The subject naturally resolves itself into two 
questions : 1st, have the Congregations issued the 
prohibitions? 2d, what authority have these Con- 
gregations, or, in other words, are their decisions 
binding ? 

Before proceeding to a discussion of these points 
our readers will naturally expect an explanation of 
what is meant by the Congregation of Rites and 
that of the Index; 

The Sacred Congregations of Rome are commit- 
tees of Cardinals, assisted by inferior officials, to 
whom the Sovereign Pontifl' intrusts the examina- 
tion, management and decision of certain classes 
of affairs. We may compare the CoUege of Car- 
dinals to a legislative body in our own country. 
The Congregations into which it is divided are like 
the various Committees of Congress or any State 
Legislature. Just as there are Committees of 
Ways and Means, of Military Aflairs, of Public 
Roads, etc:, so there are Congregations of Sacred 
Rites, of the Index, of Bishops and Regulars, of 
the Propagation of the Faith, etc. 

It is the duty of the Congregation of Rites to 



APPENDIX. m 

regulate liturgical matters, that is, things pertain- 
ing to the public ceremonies of divine worship, and 
to solve difficulties that may arise concerning 
them. 

Rubricians define sacred rites to be the laws 
prescribed by the Church for the proper regulation 
of exterior religious worship. Are we to under- 
stand this of public or private exterior worship ? 
Three reasons make us believe that it refers only 
to public worship. 1st. Sacred rites are the objects 
of that part of ecclesiostical science which treats 
of the Liturgy. Now Liturgy, as its name, derived 
from the Greek, indicates, is a public function. 2d. 
Fornici, whose book, Institutiones Liturgicae^ has 
received the praise and official approbation of the 
Roman authorities, calls sacred rites laws, St. 
Thomas defines a law to be a "rational prescrip- 
tion formed for the common good and promulgated 
bj him who has charge of the community." 
Therefore, a law differs fi:om a precept in that it 
affects men not as individuals, but as members of 
society. Hence sacred rites regard social or pub- 
lic ecclesiastical worship, not private devotions. 
3d. Sixtus v., in his Constitution for the erection 
of the Congregation of Sacred Rites, declares that 
its duty is to attend to the ceremonies, rites, etc., 
in all the churches of the city of Rome and of the 
world, that is, to public functions. 

The duty of the Congregation of the Index is to 
designate and prohibit books that are prejudicial 



IV APPfiNDIX. 

to faith or morals, to the well-being of Christian 
or civil society. The regulation of the private 
devotions of the faithful belongs to it only indi- 
rectly, or j)eT accide7is, as theologians say. If any 
formula of prayer were heretical or immoral, it 
would, by that fact, fall under the cognizance of 
the Congregation of the Index. The main busi- 
ness of that Congregation is with dangerous books 
which might instill false principles of belief or 
practice into the minds of the faithful, not with 
the prayers that they are to say in private. The 
puerile or dangerous expressions with which, as 
Clement YIII. says, some Litanies abound, subject 
them to the prohibition of the Index ; but we can 
not see why those that are orthodox in sentiment 
and phraseology should share the same fate. 

We come now to the first question : have the 
Congregation of Rites and that of the Index for- 
bidden aU Litanies but those of the Saints and of 
the Blessed Virgin ? 1. The Congregation of 
Rites has done so, as may be verified by referring 
to the decrees quoted in the article on Litanies in 
the body of the book, and to others given in the 
Deer eta Aidhentica, abridged from Gardellini. 2. 
They are besides on the Index, inasmuch as they 
are sacred rites. We have found the decree to 
which the Telegraph's correspondent refers, but 
we think that he is mistaken in his interpretation 
of it. The third number of the fourth division of 
this decree forbids other Litanies than the two 



APPENDIX. V 

mentioned to be used in sacred rites. But we trust 
we have satisfactorily proved that a sacred rite is 
a public rite. Therefore only the piihlic recitation 
of the Litanies in question is forbidden by the rules 
of the Index. Their use in private devotions re- 
mains optional, provided always the Litany said 
be not heretical or erroneous in any of its petitions, 
because then it would be forbidden by the natural 
law. 

The second question is, what authority have the 
Roman Congregations ? The answer is simple 
enough: Just as much as the Supreme Pontiff 
gives them. He is the primary source on earth 
of all ecclesiastical jurisdiction, dogmatic, moral, 
and liturgical. He may, if he wishes, delegate to 
the Congregations the plenitude of his own author- 
ity, and make their decisions binding as his own, 
or he may impart to them a limited jurisdiction, 
making their decisions bind only in particular 
cases. Which of the two has he done in regard to 
the Congregation of Sacred Rites and that of the 
Index? The teachings of approved theologians 
will help us to solve the question. 

Scavini, one of the latest Italian theologians, one 
who has systematized the doctrine of St. Alphon- 
sus Liguori, and whose book has been favorably 
received by his present Holiness, Pius IX., puts 
this question in his treatise De Legihiis : " Are the 
declarations of the Sacred Congregations bind- 
ing ?" He thus answers : 



Yl APPENDIX. 

" There is question either of the particular case 
for which the declarations were issued ; or of a dif- 
ferent, but similar case. K the first, then the de- 
cisions bind, as is evident from the contribution 
Immensa of Sixtus V. If the second, many hold 
the probable opinion that they still bind, on account 
of the similarity of the case. Others, with equal 
probability, maintain that they are not binding, 
unless issued by the command of the Pope, and 
published for the whole Church." 

There is an axiom in theology which says, lex 
dubia non potest par ere cert am oUigationem. This 
answer may require explanation for those of our 
readers who are not acquainted with theological 
technicalities. Many of the decisions of the Con- 
gregations are given in answer to particular ques- 
tions or doubts proposed by individuals or by local 
churches. For that particular case the decisions 
bind. Suppose now that a similar question arise 
in another place ; does the first decision bind in the 
second case on account of the similarity ? It is 
probable, according to the teaching of theologians, 
that it does not, and therefore we can not conclude 
that sin would be committed by its non-observance. 
Of course it ought to be adopted, if the cases are, 
in all respects, precisely similar, but we are not at 
liberty to say that it must be adopted. Theolo- 
gians always sharply distinguish between what is 
of strict precept, binding under pain of sin, and 
what is of counsel. 



APPENDIX. VII 

St. Liguori agrees with Scavini in his decision 
of the question (Lib. I. Tract 2, De Legibus, Cap 
I, Dubium 2. N. 106. Mechlin Edition, 1828.) 
Nulli duhium, quod pro casihus particular ihus, pro 
quihus Jiunt, ohllgant ut leges, prout est commune. 
Dubium est an ohUgent pro casihus similihus. Du- 
plex est sententiaj utraque prohabilis. 

Let us apply this teaching of theology to our 
subj ect-ma tter. The prohibitions of Litanies by t he 
Congregation of Rites are, as far as we have found, 
issued, with one exception, in answer to particidar 
questions asked by individuals or by local churches. 
That one exception is a general decree, quoted in 
the article on Litanies, curent Ordinarii colligere et 
vetare formulas quascumque, tarn impressas quam 
manuscriptas Litaniarum, de quarum approhatione 
non constat Die 31 Martii 1821. Deceetum 
GENERALE AD 8 (4428.) The case to which this 
decree applies is a general one, and therefore it 
binds generally. Decreta generalia Sacrce Con- 
gregationis Rltuum vim legis universalis et conscien- 
tiam ohligantis hahent (Bouix De Jure Liturgico. 
Pars secunda, Lect. II. Cap. VI. Prop. 2.) How 
far this decision is to be modified by contrary cus- 
tom, sanctioned by the tacit consent of the Holy 
See, we do not know, nor have we any right to 
say. Our learned prelates are for us the represen- 
tatives of the Pope, and when we obey them, we 
obey him, we obey Jesus Christ. 

In regard to the binding force of the decrees of 



Vm APPENDIX. 

the Index, we shall content ourselves with quoting 
an authority which " A Constant Reader " and 
every American Catholic will respect — ^the Most 
Rev. Archbishop Kenrick, of Baltimore. In the 
second volume of his Moral Theology (Tract XIII, 
De Virtutibuf TheoL, Pars la. C. V. de librorum 
prohibitione N. 56 et 57,) the distinguished pre- 
late says : " The Popes, particularly Clement YIII, 
commanded the rules of the Index to be promul- 
gated everywhere, and. the Sacred Congregation 
has declared that its decrees bmd all Christians ; 
yet the mildness and tolerance of the Sovereign 
Pontiffs allow the rigor of these rules to be relaxed 
in most places, in which Catholics hve amidst he- 
retical society. Although the intention of the 
Church is to forbid the reading of bad books, yet 
if the rules of the Bullae Coense and of the Index 
are not received amongst us (and it seems evident 
that they are not), I do not know by what univer- 
sal law the reading of the books in question is pro- 
hibited." If the work or wiiting be intrinsically 
bad, it is forbidden by the natural and positive 
divine law, and all that would follow, in the case, 
from the non-binding power of the Index in this 
country, w^ould be that persons reading bad books 
would not incur ecclesiastical penalties, although 
they would sin. Even granting, then, for the mo- 
ment, that the Litanies in question are forbidden 
in private devotions by the rules of the Index, the 
prohibition would not apply to this country. The 



APPENDIX. IX 

faithful may say them then, unless they be hereti- 
cal or otherwise erroneous. 

We conclude, 1st, it is the earnest wish of the 
Church that no other Litanies than those of the 
Saints and of the Blessed Virgin should be recited 
in public functions. 2. It is not certain whether 
that wish has the force of a law, in this country. 
3. Private devotions which conform to the public 
ones of the Church are, caeteris paribus, to be pre- 
ferred to those which do not. 



B. 

HOLY WATER, 

VINDICATED AGAINST THE SNEERS OF THE IGNORANT AND 
THE UNGODLY. 

BY THE ARCHBISHOP OF HALIFAX. 

"Let us draw near with a true heart in fulness of faith, hav- 
ing our hearts sprinkled from an evil conscience, and our bodies 
washed with clean water." — Hebrews x. 2?. 

More than enough has been said upon this part 
of our case, because, as we have seen before, it is 
not at all necessary to recur to Paganism for the 
primitive idea of Holy Water. Not only the idea, 
but the name of Holy Water, and its association 
with religious rites, is to be found in Holy Writ. 
" And he [the priest] shall take Holy Water in an 
earthen vessel, and he shall cast a little earth of 
the pavement of the tabernacle into it," etc. 
[Numbers v. 17.] That lustral Water was pre- 
served for purification, seems evident from the 
same authority, [viii. 5, 6, 7,] " And the Lord 
spoke to Moses, saying : Take the Levites out of 
the midst of the Children of Israel, and thou 
shalt purify them according to this rite: Let 
them be sprinkled with the water of purification, 
etc." 

The principle connected with this rite of the 
Catholic Church being thus sufficiently vindicated, 



APPENDIX. XI 

we must now enquire at what time, and by whom, 
was Holy Water first introduced. By the admis- 
sion of our opponents, we are enabled to go back 
for more than seventeen hundred years ; a very 
respectable antiquity, as all must allow. In a list 
of what were called " the gradual apostacies of the 
Church of Rome " we find the following : 
^aioly Water first used, A. D., 120." (*) 
Indeed, all Protestant controvertists are forced 
to admit that it is ancient as this, that is, 1736 
years old ! As they are so very considerate and 
obliging, they might have gone back a few years 
farther. After such a tremendous jump of seven- 
teen centuries and a half, a very slight additional 
effort would have brought them up to the very 
age of the Apostles. Perhaps we may coax them 
on a little further hereafter. But, in any case, an 
institution so old as this in the Christian Church — 
one which they admit was established by Pope 
St. Alexander I., who was the Sixth Bishop of 
Rome after St. Peter, — who was elected between 
the years 108 and 119 of the Christian era, (some 
say in the year 109,) does not deserve the mock- 
ery and scorn with which it is treated by the 



(*) We can not understand how the Church of England, in 
particular, can object to the use of Holy Water, or term it "an 
apostacy," when she admits that the Faith of Rome was pure 
for a long period after this. It is singular, too, that if Holy 
Water was so wicked an institution, or could not have been 
traced to the times of the Apostles, none of the four first General 
Councils should have condemned it. They were well aware of 
its existence. 



Xn APPENDIX. 

irreverent scoffers of our day. Supposing Pope 
Alexander to have been thirty years of age at 
his election, St. John the Evangelist was living for 
many years after his birth. St. Alexander i.* said 
to have studied under Pliny the younger, and 
Plutarch, and was raised to the highest dignity in 
the Church at a comparatively early age, on 
account of his extraordinary piety and learning. 
He must have seen and conversed with many who 
were acquainted with St. Peter and St. Paul, for 
he was born in Rome. Is it not most natural to 
suppose that he was well acquainted with the 
customs and rites of the Christians in the days of 
those Apostles ? 

Now, Cardinal Baronius, in his annals (ad 
annum 57,) shows, on the authority of Latin and 
Greek writers, that in the ancient Christian tem- 
ples, both amongst the Greeks and Latins, there 
was at the entrance, or porch, a font, cistern, or 
shell, in w^hich the people were wont to wa?h their 
faces and hands before they entered the house of 
prayer. (^) The same venerable authority 
[ad ann. 134] shows that the custom of blessing 
salt and water, and sprinkling the faithful there- 
with had descended from the Apostles themselves. 
But why do the profound Protestant critics of 
modern times assign the introduction of Holy 
Water to Pope Alexander ? Because in the 
ancient Liber Pontificalis attributed to Anastatius 

(*) (See 1 Tim. ii.) 



APPENDIX. Xra 

the Librarian, and confirmed by innumerable evi- 
dences of antiquity, the name of this holy Pope 
is connected with the blessing of salt and water. 
Let us see, however, in what manner. "Hie con- 
stituit aquam aspersionis cum sale benedici in 
habitaculis hominum." " He prescribed that the 
water of aspersion with salt should be blessed in 
the dwellings of men " — that is, he extended the 
use of an Apostolic custom, and permitted Holy 
Water to be blessed, and used in private houses, 
as well as in the church. 

We may here state, that the opinion which 
declares Holy Water to be useful, not only to 
excite good thoughts and pious affections in the 
mind, and to banish evil spirits, but that it also 
serves for the remission of venial sin, [as St. 
Thomas asserts in his Summa,] is confirmed by 
the following words ascribed to this holy Pope : 

"We bless, for the people, water mingled with 
salt, that all, being sprinkled therewith, may be 
sanctified and purified. This we likewise com- 
mand all priests to observe. For, if the ashes of 
a heifer, sprinkled with blood, sanctified and 
cleansed the people, how much more does not 
water, when mixed with salt, and hallowed by the 
divine prayers, make the people holy and clean ? 
And if the barrenness of water was healed when 
salt was sprinkled upon it by the Prophet Eiiseus, 
how much more, when salt is sanctified by the 
divine prayers, does it not take away human 



XIV APPENDIX. 

sterility, and sanctify, cleanse, and purify, those 
that are defiled, and multiply other blessings, and 
avert the snakes of the devil and defend mankind 
from the craftiness of evil spirits ? " (*) 

St. Clement, the Roman, [who was converted 
by St. Peter or St. Paul, and died in the year 
100,] declares that the custom of blessing Holy 
Water was established by St. Matthew, and gives 
the form of the benediction which was prescribed 
by that Evangelist. [Constitut. Apost. viii. 35.] 

Baronius relates, on the authority of St. Epi- 
phanius, that some magical incantations of the 
Jews were confoudsen ety one Josephus, a conver- 
ted Jew, through bhd prinkling of Holy Water, 
anno 327. 

Theodoret, [v. 22,] and Baronius, ann. 389, 
state that St. Marcellus, Bishop of Apamea, 
banished, by means of Holy Water, the Devil, 
who was preventing the destruction of the temple 
of Jupiter there, and that the temple was accord- 
ingly demolished. 

(*) Aquam sale conspersam populis benedicimus, uteacuncte 
aspersi sanctificentur et purificentur; quod et omnibus sacerdo- 
tibus faciendum esse mandamus. Nam si cinis vitulae sanguine 
aspersns populum sanctificabat atqne mnndabat; multo magis 
aqua sale aspersa, divinisque precibus sacrata populum sanctiJS- 
cat atque mundat? Et si sale asperso per Ileliseum Prophetam 
sterilitas aquae sanata est quanto magis divinis precibus sacra- 
tus sal sterilitatem rerum autem huraanarum, et coinquinatos 
sanctificat, atque mundat, et purgat, et cetera bona muUiplicat, 
et insidias Diaboli avertit, et a phantasraarum versutiis homines 
defendit? S. Alexan. 1. Epist. 1. ad omnes Orthodoxos. This 
epistle, though not reckoned amongst the Authentic Canons, is 
very ancient, as well as the tradition which connects Tloly Water 
with St. Alexander. 



APPENDIX. XV 

We read in the ancient life of St. Chrysostom 
that he cured a sick child, by blessing water and 
sprinkling him with it, and restored him to his 
mother free from all disease. The same Greek 
Father, [liom. 18, in 1 Cor.,] alluding to the well 
known custom of taking Holy Water, to be 
cleansed from spiritual as well as bodily defile- 
ment, says : " Why do you, after the commission 
of sin, run to the bath ? Is it not because you 
deem yourself more dirty than any filth ? " And 
again, [Hom. and Pop. Antioch,] he says : " Thou 
wouldst not attempt to touch the Sacred Victim 
with unwashed hands, although stained by great 
necessity. Do not, therefore, approach with an 
unclean soul." St. Paulinus of Nola testifies that 
the ancient Latin Churches, and especially the 
old Vatican, had fonts at their entrance ; [in Epist 
ad Alethium] and in his 32 d Epist. to Sulpicius 
Severus, he writes that the Basin or Fountain 
which he calls Cantharus, C^) furnishes water in 
the court before the Church, to wash the hands of 
the faithM who enter : — 

Sancta nitens famulis interfluit atria lymphis 
Cantharus, intrantumqwe manus lavat amne ministro. 

St. Leo, the great, erected a similar fountain 

(*) The Cantharus, from his descriptioh, seems to have been 
a fountain, in which the water was made to jut forth from curi- 
ous statuary, with a small dome or cupola over it, covered with 
brass, to protect it from the weather. "Ubi Cantharum ministra 
manibus et oribus nostris fluenta ructantem fastigiatus solido 
sede thronus ornat et inumbrat : non sine mystica specie quatuor 
columnis salientes aquas ambiens." 



XVI APPENDIX. 

before the Church ot St. Paul, at Rome, on which 
it is said the following verses were inscribed : 

Unda lavat carnis maculas, sed crimina purgat, 
Purificatque animas mundior amne fides. 
Quisque suis meritis veneranda sacraria Pauli 
Ingrederis supplex, ablue fonte manua 
Perdiderat laticum longaeva incuria cursus. 
Quos tibi nunc pleno Cantharus ore vomit. 
Provida Pastoris per totum cura Leonis 
Haec ovibus Christi larga fluenta dedit. 

'^ Water washes the stains of the flesh ; but 
faith, purer than water, cleanses from crime, and 
purifies souls. Whoever thou art that enterest in 
suppliant spirit this sacred temple, which is ven- 
erable for the merits of him [St. Paul] whose 
name it bears, wash thy hands in this fountain. — 
Through long neglect, had been lost, the water- 
course which this ornamental fountain now pours 
forth for thee in abundant streams. The provi- 
dent and comprehensive care of Leo, the shepherd, 
.has supplied the flock of Christ with these copious 
waters." 

In the life of Pope Symmachus, by Anaitasius 
the Librarian, we are informed that this holy 
Pontiff also erected a fountain at the church 
doors. "Ante fores Basilicse gradus fecit in atrio 
et Cantharum." 

The same custom prevailed amongst the Greeks. 
In the 4th Chap. 10 Book of his Ecclesiastical 
History, Eusebius tells us that at the beauteous 
Temple which Paulinus had built at Tyre, he 
placed fountains to wash the hands of those who 



APPENDIX. XVII 

entered as symbols of sacred expiations : '' liunc 
sacrarum expiationum signa posiiisse^ fontes scili- 
cet ex adverse Ecclesise structos, qui interius 
sacrarium ingressuris copiosos latices ad abluen- 
dum ministrarent." [Loc. citat.] Paul the Silent, 
in his description of the celebrated Sancta Sophia, 
mentions a fountain of this description in connec- 
tion with that temple. We have before quoted 
St. Chrysostom, who, in different parts of his 
works, alludes to this common usage in the Greek 
Church. To the text already cited we might add 
a passage from his lii. Homily on S. Mattheiv, from 
his iii. Homily on the Epist. to the Ephesians, and 
from his Ixxii. on S. John, where, reproaching the 
faithful for not practically realizing, in the purifi- 
cation of their souls, that cleansing of which they 
were symbolically admonished by the waters at 
the church door, he says : " When we enter the 
Temple, we wash the hands, but not the heart." 

Hence, down to the present day, the Greeks 
observe the rite of blessing and sprinkling Holy 
Water, as well as the Latins. The benediction of 
the water is confined, amongst them, to the first 
Sunday of the month, and after the blessing, the 
Rubric directs the priest to sprinlde the water 
upon the church and congregation. [Gear. Euchol. 
Gracor, 441, 448, 451.] 

But on the day of the Epiphany, which is cele- 
brated as the day of Christ's Baptism, {^) nearly 

(*) The three Epiphanies, or manifestations of Christ, are al- 



XVIII APPENDIX. 

all the Oriental Christians, as well as the Greek 
Churchj perform a very solemn blessing of Holy 
Water. They carry some of this water home, 
sprinlding their houses with it, and keep the 
remainder, with much reverence, until the next 
recurrence of the Epiphany. [Goar.^Seq.] In 
his Ixxiv. Homily^ preached on this Festival, St. 
Chrysostom distinctly mentions this custom. Of 
course we are not surprised to learn from the 
accounts of travelers, that the same rite is 
observed with much solemnity by the Russian 
Church. 

If we return to the Latin Church, and follow 
the chain of proofs in reference to the use of Holy 
Water which extends from the early ages to the 
present the testimonies are so abundant, that we 
should never hsLve done, if we were to recount 
them all. 

St. Gregory, of Tours, in his life of St. Quintin, 
[anno. 506,] relates that that holy Bishop cured, 
of a violent fever, the family of the Senator Hor- 
tensius, by sending them some Holy Water. 

St. Gregory, the Great, gives an account of a 



luded to in the Antiphon at Magnificat on this day, in the Roman 
Breviary: "Tribus miraculis ornatum diem sanctum colimus. 
Hodie Stella duxit ad praesepium. Hodie vinum ex aqua factum 
est ad nuptias. Hodie in Jordane a Jobanne Christus baptizari 
voluit ut salvaret nos. Alleluia." The baptism of Christ is 
also alluded to in the hymn, (from Sedulius, anno 412,) on this 
day: 

Lavacra puri gurgitis 

Coelestis Agnus attigit, etc. 



\ 



\ 



APPENDIX. XIX 

certain Goth who had his thigh bone broken in 
two, and who w^as perfectly cured by some Holy 
Water, which St. Fortunatus sent to him by one 
of his Deacons. It will be seen in the extract 
which we give from this holy Pope, the Apostle 
of the English, that the words Holy Water are 
used three times, "Cui [Diacono] leneddam 
aqiiam venerabihs Fortunatus statim dedit dicens ; 
vade citius, et eam super jacentis corpus projice. 
Perrexit itsque diaconus atque ad Gothum intro- 
gressus, hcnedidam aqiiam super membra illius 
aspersit. Res mira et vehementer stupenda ! mose 
ut aqua lenedida Gothi coxam contigit, ita omnis 
fractura solidata est, et saluti pristinse coxa resti- 
tuta, ut hora eadem de lecto surgeret, etc." S. 
Greg. M. Dial, gs. i. 10. 

St. Braulio, Bishop of Saragossa, a disciple of 
the renowned St. Isidore, of Seville, wrote, 
amongst other works, a Life of St. (Emilianus, a 
holy Priest, who died upwards of a hundred years 
old, in the year 564. In the list of miracles 
wrought by him, St. Braulio, chap, xvii., describes 
his casting out a devil from the house of a Senator 
through the agency of Holy Water and fasting. 
•'Tertio die expleto veto indicti jejunii, salem 
exorcizat et aquae commiscet more Uecclisiastico ac 
donum ipsam aspergere coepit. Tunc ex intestino 
domus prorupit invidus," etc. " The vow of the 
appointed fast having been accomphshed on the 
third day, he exorcises salt, and mixes it with water* 



XX APPENDIX. 

accordwg to the msiom of the Chiirchj and began 
to sprinkle the house itself," etc. 

If we go from Spain to England, we find Vene- 
rable Bede frequently alluding to the same well 
known custom of the Church. Besides the pas- 
sage already given from his Ecclesiastical History 
of the English Nation, there are many others 
equally pertinent ; such as, " Tunc henedixi aquam, 
et astulam robois prsefati immittens obtuli segro 
potandum. Nee mora : mehus habere coepit," etc 
Lib. iii. c. 13. 

About the same period [anno 700] the celebra- 
ted St. Willibrord delivered a house from the 
infestation of evil spirits by means of Holy Water. 
Alhinus Flaccus in vita S. Willibrord. 

His contemporary, St. Hubert, Bishop and 
Patron of Liege, clearly described the efficacy of 
water mixed with salt, and blessed by the Priest, 
by the authority of the Apostles, as a protection 
against the assaults of our spiritual enemy. His 
words are quoted by Sarius [in vita 3 Novemb.,] 
and will be found in the margin. (*) 

Passing over a long series of similar authorities 
in Ecclesiastical writers. Missals, Liturgical Books, 
etc., we now come to an Wsh Saint and Bishop, 

(*) Vide aquam quae sacerdotali consecratione sale admixto 
benedicta, et ad effugandam inimici nequitiam orationis virtute 
impregnata est liquorque olim itidem Apostolica auctoritate 
benedictus hue inferatur, quorum aspergine atque litura mox ita 
effugabuntur hinc inimici virulenta phantasma, ut amplius nou 
audeat sua iuferre machiuameuta. 



APPENDIX. XXI 

the illustrious Malachy, one of the great successors 
of St. Patrick in the Archiepiscopal see of Armagh 
and Primate of Ireland. His intimacy with St. 
Bernard is well known, and the eloquent anchorite 
of Clairvaux, in the life of St. Malachy, which he 
composed, and in the sermon which he delivered 
on his death, has left to future ages the most un- 
doubted proofs of his profound veneration for the 
sanctity and virtues of the Irish Prelate, whom he 
loved with all the warmth and fervor of true Chris- 
tian friendship. Describing the wonders which 
were wrought by this holy man, St. Bernard men- 
tions several in which Holy Water was employed. 
Thus, in returning from Rome, whither he had 
gone to receive the Pallium, he remained for a 
short time with St. Bernard and his holy commu- 
nity at Clairvaux. From thence on his way home, 
he safely arrived in Scotland, and found Henry, 
the son ofEang David, at the point of death. The 
monarch " humbly entreated him to heal his son. 
He sprinkled the youth with water which he hlessed- 
and, looking upon him, said — " Have confidence, 
my child, you will not die this time." On the fol, 
lowing day his health was restored, to the great 
dehght of his father, and amidst the joyous shouts 
of his family." So writes St. Bernard. [Lih. de 
vita S. Malachiae cap xvu.~\ " Malachias perfectus 
a nobis, prospere pervenit in Scotiam. Et invenit 
David regem qui adhuc hodie superest, in quodam 
castello suo ; cujus fihus infirmabatur ad mortem. 



XXn APPENDIX. 

Ad quern ingress us honorifice a Rege susceptus, 
et humiliter exoratusut sanaret filium suum; aqua 
cui benedixit, aspersit Juvenem, et intueiis in eum, 
sit ; Confide^ fili; non morieiis hac vice. Dixit 
hoc, et die sequenti. . . . secuta est sanitas, 
sanitatem Isetitia patris, clamor et strepitus totius, 
exultantis familise." St. Bernard declares that 
when he wrote, both father and son were still liv- 
ing, and that they loved St. Malachy as long as 
he survived. We may also state, in passing, that 
he praises the young Scottish Prince very warmly, 
describing him as "a brave and prudent soldier, 
and a zealous lover of justice." 

St. Bernard relates another miraculous cure ef- 
fected by St. Malachy, in Leinster, on an insane 
woman, who was tied down with ropes, whom he 
ordered to be unloosod, and sprinkled, or rather 
washed [with Holy Water. " In regione eadem 
[Laginia] ligatam funibus phreneticam solvi jussit 
et in aqua, quam henedixit lavari Lota est, et 
sanata est." [Ibid. cap. xx.] 

In like manner, with Holy Water, he cured Count 
Durmod, a wicked man and a glutton, who had been 
long confined to his bed. St. Malachy severely 
rebuked him for his sinful life, and, sprinkling him 
with Holy Water, made him rise without delay, so 
that he was able to mount his horse at once, to the 
great amazement of his friends. "Diarmitium 
Comitem, midto jam temjoore dceamleeptem ledo, 
duriter quidem increpans, quod malus homo esseti 



APPENDIH. XXm 

immoderatius serviens ventri et guise lenedicta as- 
persiim aqua surgere, fecit sine mora, ita valentem, 
ut equum ascenderet, illico, etc." [chap, xxiii.] 
During his last journey towards K-ome, he died at 
his beloved Clairvaux on the way. St. Bernard 
hkewise mentions that he cured a woman of a 
dreadful cancer, by sprinkling Holi/ Water upon 
it. This occurred in the North of England, at a 
place which St. Bernard calls Gisiburne. " Ibi 
adducta est ad earn, mulier patiens morbum, quern 
cancrum vulgo appellant, ipso horrendum visu ; et 
sanavit eam. Nam ubi aqua cui benedixit, asper- 
sa sunt ulcerum loca dolorem non sensit. Die 
vero sequenu vix ulcera apparebant. [Id. c. xxx.] 
This miracle occurred in the year 1148, the very 
year of the Saint's death, who expired at Clair- 
vaux on the 2d of November. It was the same 
year that the celebrated battle of the Standard, so 
disastrous to the Scotch, was fought between King 
David, who w^as the uncle of Matilda and Stephen 
the Norman, who had so craftily usurped the Eng- 
Hsh throne soon after the death of Henry I. 

But we have been led farther than we intended 
both in time and place. Heturning to France, and 
going back two centuries earher, we have an im- 
portant testimony respecting the custom of bless- 
ing water, and sprinkling the people with it, which 
now prevails throughout the Catholic Church. In 
the Capitulary of Hincmar, Bishop of Bheims, 
anno 852. he gives the following direction in the 



XXIV AdPENDIX. 

5th chapter : " On every Sunday, let each priest 
in his own church, before the solemnities of Mass, 
in a clean vessel, bless the Holy Water, with whi( h 
the people entering into the church are to be 
sprinkled, and let those who will, take some of it, 
in clean vessels, and sprinkle it through then* houses 
and fields, as well as on their food and their drink." 
" Omni die Dominico quisque Presbyter in sua 
Ecelesia ante Missarum solemnia aquam henedic- 
tarn faded in vase nitido, de qua populus in trans 
ecclesiam aspergatur, et qui voluerint in vasculis 
nitidis ex ilia accipiant, et per mansiones et agros, 
necnon super cibos et potum sunm conspergant" 



o. 
HARD TO PLEASE. 

A New Miracle for the Romanists. — A curious 
anecdote is related of Captain Kellet's ship, the 
Resolute. When the last expedition in search of 
Franklin was going out, Captain Kellet dined with 
a distinguished friend, and the lady of the house 
made him a present. The lady was no Papist, any 
more than the Captain, but the present was neither 
more nor less than a huge wax candle, six feet 
long, which had been duly blessed, and had been 
the gift of a Monsignore. The fair donor of course 
remarked that the candle would bring the vessel 
out of all her perils, and accordingly it was swung 
in the captain's cabin. Alas for the Palladium ! 
the Resolute was abandoned in the Arctic Seas. 
When anything went wrong, there is reason to be- 
lieve that the sailors muttered, " It's all owing to 
that Papist candle;" and when the ship was aban- 
doned, of course, it was quite easy to understand 
the cause. The Resolute, after all, is saved, and 
a grand reception is to be given to the American 
officers who are bringing her home. But what has 
saved the Resolute, if it is not the candle ? Is it 
not as good a miracle as any emblazoned in the 
records of the Roman Church? — Corr^ of London 
Spectator. 



XXVI APPENDIX. 

This is the first intimation of the incident above 
recorded, that we have met with. We suppose it 
to be a fact, as it rests on the testimony of an 
enemy ; and we would not withhold from our read- 
ers whatever of just edification they may find in 
the narrative, distorted and disfigured though it 
be by such unfriendly comments. 

Catholics, whatever this ill-natured critic may 
say or think to the contrary, possess in their his- 
tory too many and too well-authenticated miracles 
to require the aid of false or doubtful ones. And 
had it never pleased God to dispense, even in one 
solitary instance, with the laws of physical nature 
in favor of His Church, yet she might triumphantly 
point to a miracle — the like of which mankind 
never beheld' — her own preservation in the midst 
of a hostile world — a miracle that, extending over 
eighteen centuries, is solely Hers, Her brightest 
glory, Her firmest testimony. That hell's gates 
have not prevailed against Her long, long ago, is 
proof more than sufficient of the Omnipotence 
which God has exerted in redeeming the promise 
once made to Her in the person of Her Visible 
Founder. But She does not lack many other, more 
or less palpable, signs of divine protection, tokens 
of His perpetual presence, workings of that All- 
powerful Hand which is ever stretched over Her, 
not only to shield Her from destruction, but to give 
effect to Her prayers, crown Her with blessings, lift 
up and cheer the drooping hearts of Her children, 



APPENDIX. xxyn 

and exalt Her to the shame and dismay of Her en- 
emies. Of these, some are public and manifest to 
the eyes of all ; others are private, and have no 
witness hut the recipient of such favor, or a few 
chosen souls. Some are of a character so positive 
and direct, that no rational man can call in ques- 
tion the agency to which they are due ; others, 
again, are of such tranquil, unostentatious nature, 
that the world passes them by without a thought, 
and the finger of God is recognized therein by 
pious souls, whose eye of faith is purified, because 
they habitually live beyond this atmosphere of 
sense. 

That a blessed candle should be the means of 
preserving the Resolute from total destruction, even 
after her being abandoned by captain and crew, is 
what no Catholic is called on to beheve in virtue 
of his religion. Yet even those who recognize no 
efficacy in blessed candles, or other things held 
sacred by the Catholic Church, must feel surpiised 
by the mere coincidence of these two facts- — ^the 
presence of the blessed candle, and the saving of 
the abandoned ship under the most unfavorable 
circumstances. But that Divine Providence should 
manifest itself in this seeming trifle — ^though no 
matter of certainty, much less of faith — ^fornishes 
no ground of surprise or astonishment to the mind 
of any pious, intelligent Catholic. He knows that 
God has been pleased to work wonders, not only 
through the Hving voice of His beloved Son, and 



XXVin APPENDIX, 

His Saints in every age, but even through mute, 
inanimate objects, that could boast of nothing more 
than an indirect quahty of being mere memorials 
of their presence in this world. The mouldering 
bones of a dead prophet ; the shadow of an Apos- 
tle as he passed along the highway ; the oil of a 
lamp that burned before a martyr's shrine ; the 
sight alone of sainted relics, as they were borne 
along in festive procession — all these, if we believe 
the Scriptures and the most venerable Fathers of 
the Church, have been made the means of miracu- 
lous interposition between God and His creatures. 
And what wonder then is it, that a simple candle, 
which has been blessed by the prayers of His earthly 
Spouse, which has been privileged so far as to do 
homage to Him, by the offering to Him of its life 
and substance, by burning (though it were even 
for a few minutes) in the presence of the Holy of 
Holies, should be thereby made a depositor}^ of 
His power, an instrument of His clemency, to shield 
His creatures from peril and harm ? 

The Catholic Church seems to be the only one 
to understand the mystery of God's omnipotence, 
whenever it pleases Him to interfere with the es- 
tablished laws of nature. Be the action great or 
small, trifling or marvelous the circumstances^ 
under which His intervention takes place, She 
always looks up to Him with the same affectionate 
reverence, the same worshipful wonder, with which 
she uniformly regards the Author of good in all 



APPENDIX. XXIX 

His works. She knows that His arm is all-power- 
ful, and can wield in its service, with the same ease, 
the aid of any creature, great or small. Hence it 
is that in the angry deluge or in the placid rain- 
bow. She recognizes one and the same hand. In 
the quiet dove that bears tidings of peace to the 
Ark, or in the fiery rain that consumes godless 
cities ; in the silent raven that bears daily food to 
a saintly hermit, or in the fierce lions that dig his 
grave; in the world-renowned miracles of the 
Pauls, Xaviers, and other illustrious Apostles, or 
in the silent wonders of her Philumenas and other 
saints, unknown to man — she sees only the work- 
ing of one and the same Divine Power. No spe- 
cious appearance, much less any supposed inherent 
virtue, of the instruments used by that Power can, 
attract Her attention or excite Her admiration. If 
She regard them at all, it is solely with a view to 
praise and exalt the Wisdom that deigns to use 
such "weak and scanty elements " to carry out Its 
great designs and lofty purposes. 

The lady who gave the candle, seems to have 
had no behef in its efficacy. But even in the jo- 
cose, flippant strain in which it was offered in gift, 
not a few Catholic readers may recognize a taunt 
or challenge to that Divine Power which pervades, 
blesses and renders fruitful every prayer and action 
of the Church ; and in the event they will not fail 
to recognize a vindication of the claims of that 
same Divine Power. They will say that her words 



XXX APPEFDIX. 

were tlioiiglitlessly uttered ; but that God veriiied, 
if He did not inspire, them. And if they are at all 
versed in the history of God's Church, they will 
recall to mind the days of Boniface and Aglae, and 
will remember how a few jesting words uttered be- 
tv/een the dissolute Roman and his fan- paramour, 
were changed, by God's grace, into a prophecy, 
the fulfillment of which resulted in the conversion 
of the one and the martyrdom of the other. And 
all sacred history is rife with hke instances. 

Sectarian critics are indeed hard to please. Do 
what we will, or happen what may, we are sure to 
be condemned. Had the Resolute been lost, the 
failure of the blessed candle to save it would have 
been unsparingly ridiculed ; the boat is saved evi- 
dently by a remarkable agency of Providence, and 
nevertheless, the blessed candle still furnishes a 
theme for anti-Cathohc jesting. The same deter- 
mination to put us always in the wTong is seen in 
a thousand other things. An American Bishop 
issues a regulation regarding funerals, in order to 
enforce Christian propriety amongst his Cathohc 
flock on such occasions; and sectarian journals, 
after styhng it " the most sensible edict ever issued 
by a Bomish bishop," and lamenting that Protes- 
tants have no means of preventing like excesses 
among themselves, passes on with most Unreason- 
able and perverse spirit, to denounce the abject, 
degrading slavery in which Catholic prelates hold 
their spuitual subjects. An Austrian bishop, full 



APPENDIX. XXXI 

of zeal for God's law, denounces the censure of the 
church against all military officers, who shall here- 
after desecrate the Sunday by hunting and other 
profane diversions ; and our fanatical Sabbatarians, 
instead of applauding this zeal for strict observ- 
ance of the Lord's Day, only chuckle with ill-sup- 
pressed delight over the real or imagined disaffec- 
tion toward the church, which this measure is said 
to have caused in the Austrian army. And so on 
in a thousand other cases, which we need not de- 
tail. It is a settled conclusion with them, ^^ no 
good can come out of Nazareth." The church is 
evidently, after the example of her Divine Master, 
" signum contradictionis," a mark set up for con- 
tradiction, not only in the sense that She, like Him, 
is to be gainsay ed and combatted every where, but 
also in this other, that She is to be assailed by con- 
tradictions, that is, by charges not only void of 
truth, but so far apart, so diametrically opposed to 
each other, that they mutually destroy one ano- 
ther by their very contradictioUc 



CONTENTS. 

Introduction, ----- 9 

What is a Sacramental ? - - - 14 

Pkayers of the Church : 

The Prayers of the Church, - - 19 

I. Litanies, - - - - 22 

II The Angehjs, - . - . 30 

III Hymns, - . > . 36 

lY. Th3 ConBteor, - - . - 41 

Benedictions g? the Church : 

The Benedictions of the Church, 47 

I. Blessed Candles, - - - 49 

II. Holy Water, - - . 55 

III. Holy Ash^s, - . ^ . 65 

IV. Our Lord's Cross, - - - 71 
V. The Cross and the Crucifix, - 83 

VI. The Relics of the Passion, - 95 

VIL The Golden Rose, - . . 108 

VIII The Holy Oils, - - >- 114 



CONTENTS. 

IX. Blessed Palm, - - - - 124 

X. The Paschal Candle, - - 131 

XL The Agnus Dei, - - - 135 

XII. The Rosaiy, - . - 144 

XIII. The Scapular of Oar Lady of Mount 

Carmel, - - - - 159 

XIV. The Red Scapular of the Passion, 171 
XV. Blessed Food, - - - 181 

XVI. The Episcopal Ornaments, - - 190 
XVII. The Pallium, ... 213 

Appendix : 

A. The Sacramentals. 

B. Holy Water. 

C. Hard to Please. 



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The ^acamentals of the Holy Catholic 

CHURCH, OR FLOWERS FROM THE GARDEN OF THE 
LITURGY, By Rev. Wm. J. Barry, approved by the Most Rev. 
John B. Purcell, D. D., Archbishop of Cincinnati. Cloth, plain, 
75 cts. ; gilt sides $1,00; gilt edges and sides $1,25. 



Preparing for immediate Publication : 

•^ Book of Popular Myins, for youth. 
The Midden Treasure^ 



Deacidified using the Bookkeeper procei 
Neutralizing agent: Magnesium Oxide 
Treatment Date: Feb. 2006 

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